Django ORM allows one to seamlessly represent database (DB) data as instances of Python classes (models).  This includes relationships between objects, such that when a model (A) has a foreign key relationship (let’s say field name ‘related_b’) to another model (B), all you need to do to navigate from an instance of A (a) to the related instance of B (b) is “a.related_b”. By default, this will fetch “b” from the database, which is both amazingly convenient and also terrifying. I say terrifying with some degree of jest, but also plenty of seriousness that will be appreciated by those of us who know what it’s like to deal with a production database that is melting (struggling) under load. 

VueConf was finally back in person this year, so Max Bogue and I were excited to travel to Fort Lauderdale and meet a bunch of interesting leaders in the Vue space. We are both Software Engineers at PathAI, a startup working to transform the field of pathology using machine learning. Specifically, we work on the web-based slide viewer that powers our products and allows pathologists to read digitized microscopic tissue biopsies. Our teams are always eager to learn about the latest advancements in the Open Source community. With that, here are some of our favorite talks that took place during the conference.

At the beginning of June, Sr. Software Engineer Max King had a chance to sit down with the folks at Venture Fizz and talk about the PathAI Engineering team. Max has been with PathAI since June of 2019 and was previously a Sr. Research Software Engineer working on High Performance Computing at Brown University. At PathAI, Max is a part of the ML Ops team working to ensure our ML models and platform can scale to the demands of our customer and internal workloads.

With the PyTorch 1.12 release hot off the press, let’s dive into the release notes and check out three exciting features in this release. For context, at PathAI, we use PyTorch pretty much exclusively for our Machine Learning infrastructure. The pythonic and robust nature of PyTorch makes it a natural fit for our workflows. You can check out our recently published case study on how we use PyTorch to improve patient outcomes.