This week we welcome Chris Moffitt (@chris1610) as our PyDev of the Week! Chris has been an active writer about Python on his blog and a speaker at DjangoCon. Let’s spend a few moments getting to know him better. Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc): I currently live near St. […]
PyDev of the Week: Chris Moffitt Read More »
One of the first items you learn as a beginner Python programmer is how to import other modules or packages. However, I’ve noticed that even people who have used Python casually for multiple years don’t always know how flexible Python’s importing infrastructure is. In this article, we will be looking at the following topics: Regular
Python 101: All about imports Read More »
This week we welcome Brett Cannon (@brettsky) as our PyDev of the Week. He is a Python core developer (since 2003!) and a Python blogger. Brett has been a speaker at PyCon for several years. You can check out some of his talks on YouTube (for example How to make your code Python 2/3 compatible).
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Today one of my coworkers came and got me so that I could explain some weird Python code they’d found. It dealt with cmake, but since it was internal code, I won’t be able to show it here. Instead, I wrote up something that has the same issues so you can see what I consider
Python: An Example of Bad Monkey Patching Read More »
A cache is a way to store a limited amount of data such that future requests for said data can be retrieved faster. In this article, we’ll look at a simple example that uses a dictionary for our cache. Then we’ll move on to using the Python standard library’s functools module to create a cache.
Python: An Intro to caching Read More »
This week we welcome Cyrille Rossant (@cyrillerossant) as our PyDev of the Week! Cyrille is one of the core developers behind the VisPy project. He is also the author of several Python books like Learning IPython for Interactive Computing and Data Visualization and IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook. His blog is also well worth
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Reportlab is really nice tool for creating PDFs in Python. A little known fact is that they now support adding charts or graphs to your PDF. Previously if you wanted that functionality, you would have to do all the drawing code yourself. Unfortunately, the Reportlab guide doesn’t really explain how to use their charts, what
Reportlab – How to Add Charts / Graphs Read More »
There is a little known tool that I wanted to talk about today. It is called wraps and it’s a part of the functools module. You can use wraps as a decorator to fix docstrings and names of decorated functions. Why does this matter? This sounds like a weird edge case at first, but if
Python – How to use functools.wraps Read More »
This week we welcome Mike Bayer (@zzzeek) as our PyDev of the Week. Mike is the creator of the popular SQLAlchemy project. He has a fun Python blog and contributes to many Python projects. I’ve seen Mike present tutorials on SQLAlchemy at PyCon and he regularly does talks there as well (here’s an example from
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Python comes with a fun module called functools. One of its classes is the partial class. You can use it create a new function with partial application of the arguments and keywords that you pass to it. You can use partial to “freeze” a portion of your function’s arguments and/or keywords which results in a
This week we welcome Chris Withers as our PyDev of the Week! Chris has been using Python for quite a while. I think the first packages I used of his were the excellent xlrd and xlwt packages, used for reading and writing Excel files. You can get an idea of his contributions to Python on
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Earlier this week, I came across another fun package called datefinder. The idea behind this package is that it can take any string with dates in it and transform them into a list of Python datetime objects. I would have loved this package at my old job where I did a lot of text file
Python – The datefinder package Read More »
Webucator recently contacted me to let me know that they have finished up an Introduction to Python Training that they are allowing people to take for free for the month of February. The course is made up of videos, exercises, readings, and quizzes. You can get it free by using the following code when you
Free Intro to Python Course from Webucator Read More »
This week we welcome Oliver Schoenborn as our PyDev of the Week. He is the author of the PyPubSub project, a version of which is included with wxPython. He has been an active contributor on the wxPython mailing list where I have always appreciated his insights. You might find his Dr. Dobbs article interesting as
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Every so often you will find yourself needing to write code that traverse a directory. They tend to be one-off scripts or clean up scripts that run in cron in my experience. Anyway, Python provides a very useful method of walking a directory structure that is aptly called os.walk. I usually use this functionality to
Python 101: How to traverse a directory Read More »