PITTSBURGH — So many languages, so little time.
Nathan Peck, who has deep experience with JavaScript, is the first to acknowledge that he’s no Python expert. But he knows what it’s like to be asked to make sense of someone else’s Python code.
“My relationship with Python has been as someone who’s helping operate a system that has Python involved with it,” said Peck, a senior developer advocate for generative AI at Amazon Web Services.
In a typical scenario, he said in this episode of The New Stack Makers, recorded at PyCon US, a colleague has “written the Python script and they come to me and say,’ I need to run this Python script as a cron job that runs every night.’”
That challenge, he said, is common on engineering teams. “All of us try to be T-shaped developers,” he said. “There’s all different things we’ve touched over the course of our career. And then there’s a couple of different, deep areas we’ve focused in on, but it’s really hard to have depth across every programming language in every framework that’s out there.”
In November, Amazon Web Services announced Amazon Q, a generative AI coding assistant. In this episode of Makers, Peck demoed Amazon Q Developer, showing how it can help parse Python code and make building apps in the language easier.
Summarizing AWS Documentation
In the demo, Peck showed our Makers audience how Amazon Q now has an extension that users can install within their integrated development environment (IDE). “I personally use VS Code on a daily basis,” he said. “And once it’s in there, I can now interact with my code base by passing off portions of it to Amazon Q, to ask it to explain, refactor, fix.
“I can also even ask Amazon Q to start developing a new feature on my code base, and see what kind of responses I get back from that.”
Peck has worked at AWS for more than seven years, he said, and in that time “I’ve read a lot of the documentation, I still haven’t read all of it. There’s so many pages of documentation, it’s hard to sort of ingest all that info, without something to help you sort of handhold you through that.”
The coding assistant, he suggested, excels at surfacing best practices from the documentation it’s been trained on.
Amazon Q Developer can be sampled for free, Peck said, if you have an AWS Builder ID — you don’t need an AWS cloud account. Check out the full video to see Amazon Q Developer in action.
The post How To Start Building in Python With Amazon Q Developer appeared first on The New Stack.
The generative AI coding assistant can help Pythonistas build more easily — and help all devs make sense of Python code, said Nathan Peck of AWS in this episode of The New Stack Makers.