Readit News- Creating and migrating the test DB is slow. There is no shame in storing and committing a premigrated sqlite test DB generated upon release, it's often small in size and will save time for everyone.
- Stash your old migrations that nobody use anymore.
- Use python -X importtime and paste the result in an online viewer. Sometimes moving heavy imports to functions instead of the global scope will make individual tests slower, but collection will be faster.
- Use pytest-xdist
- Disable transactions / rollback on readonly tests. Ideally you want most of your non-inserting tests to work on the migrated/preloaded features in your sqlite DB.
We can enter into more details if you want, but the pre migrated DB + xdist alone allowed me to speedup tests on a huge project from 30m to 1m.
Not on this list that I thought were particularly excellent, [goodreads rating in brackets]:
[4.26] Between Two Fires by Christopher Buhuelman https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13543121-between-two-fir... Horror-Fantasy. Absolutely loved this book, a travelogue through France in the grip of the Black Plague...inflicted upon humanity by Lucifer in the war on Heaven. See the sights as God abandons his children and devils in both man and mythic form ruin His creation. Takes on a hallucinatory, Book of Revelations, William Blake on bad acid feel and builds to a tremendous crescendo while retaining deep heart and complex characters.
Christopher Buhuelman is one of my favorite "new" authors, his new fantasy series The Blacktongue Thief[4.22] and The Daughters War[4.3] are both excellent as well. His horror chops enable him to to make what might be more traditional fantasy stories much more impactful. For example, The Daughters War is about an desperate existential war against goblins that is fucking horrifying, which is impressive for a critter traditionally deployed for comic effect or disposable fodder for the heroes to kick about. Even though you "know" that humans win in the end because of the chronology of the series (this was book takes place before the The Blacktongue Thief which was published first), it doesn't feel like it ever. Which is the magic of good horror writing, and is often missing from fantasy which can feel like there are no real stakes sometimes despite the epic scales presented.
[4.22] Piranesi by Susanna Clark https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50202953-piranesi Labyrinth-Fantasy. Another book I adored, this novel has a sense of place so tangible that I am convinced that it actually exists and Susanna has been there. Piransi lives in what amounts to a pocket dimension, an infinite labyrinthine house containing amongst other things an ocean whose tides rage through the halls, flooding and revealing them in turn.
[4.3] Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim... Alien Encounter-SciFi. Omitting this from any best of list shows the list isn't particularly serious, this novel is exceptional. On a distant exoplanet being terraformed for future humans, a disaster leaves the scientist in charge alone and cut off from humanity, and rather than seeding the new world with monkeys to be uplifted, she uplifts instead a small species of jumping spider. We experience its evolution across millenia and as its society reaches the space faring age, until it's encounter with the last desperate remnants of humanity, fleeing a doomed civilization and descending into barbarism. The narrative techniques to tell a story of this scope work exceptionally well and the whole tale moves quickly and with surprising emotional heft. To bring the audience to understand a world and society entirely unlike ours, and make it relatable and poignant is truly impressive. I really don't like spiders, but by the end of this book I was rooting for them... at humanity's expense.
Because of shifting demographics in the book buying market, readers looking for good yarns outside of the current trend of romantasy and/or cozy scifi/fantasy may feel a little left out, but there are tons of great authors that may be forgotten from these lists for a while. I heartily recommend:
Anything by Jay Kristoff https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4735144.Jay_Kristoff, ex Nevernight[4.22] or Empire of the Vampire[4.35].
Anything by Joel Shepherd https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/215710.Joel_Shepherd, ex Spiral Wars series (scifi space opera with fascinating AI) [4.27-4.56], Cassandra Kressnov series (cyberpunk) [3.88-4.0], A Trial of Blood & Steel series (fantasy) [3.9-4.26].
Pierce Brown's Red Rising sci-fi series is excellent and magnificent in scope and scale.
Anything by Joe Abercrombie for gritty low fantasy with buckets of blood, humor, populated with legendary characters. The Bloody-Nine, Dogman, Black Dow, Caul mfing Shivers anyone? His latest series https://www.goodreads.com/series/211497-the-age-of-madness [4.45-4.6] was fantastic.
And of course the other books mentioned by other commenters, particularly anything by Ian M Banks.
Sure the 3 million is a seed round but the US spent 300 times as much on its exploratory “seed” round in 1960.
It is unlikely until he extreme that any real “moonshot” will achieve significant impact without the combined talents of a large percentage of the world greatest talents driven by goals of the highest social priority funded by limitless pockets and organized by the very best managers and leaders that society can produce.
3m will achieve none of that.
In fact as Jetbrains has been spending years chasing various rabbits including AI, instead of substantially improving or fixing PyCharm, without you steadily replacing/repairing big chunks of Pycharms functionality I would be miserable. If it came down to it, we would happily pay a reasonable license fee to use your tools as long as they stayed free for non-commercial usage.