#python-tips

Introducing pipenv

In computer science, in the context of data storage, serialization (or serialisation) is the process of translating data structures or object state into a format that can be stored (for example, in a file

Requests is a powerful and easy to use HTTP library for Python Need to get HTML data? Need to interact with an API? Requests can do that. While Python has a built-in library urllib3 for these situations,

Walrus Operator The Walrus Operator is a new assignment operator announced in Python 3.8 that looks like a walrus. The walrus operator is used to simplify code when you need an expression while storing

Beyond print() print() is a great quick and dirty way to log to the console in python. Even senior developers will use print() all the time. For anything more than a quick app you should be using a real

Introducing Apscheduler Apscheduler is a job manager (similar to cron) to run sections of code on a schedule. I use it frequently to manage jobs that need to run at a set interval. Apscheduler can be used

Being a good programmer isn't just about knowing how to do everything or even being very good at it. One of the most valuable skills of a good programmer is just knowing something exists. Sometimes it

This really isn't about Python directly, but it is an important topic every developer should know. DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) is a popular programming concept of avoiding repeat code. The main goal of

Expiring Dict Expiring dict is a very useful library for caching data via ordered dictionaries. It works similar to a regular dictionary but will cache data for a short period of time. It can be used as

Python Virtual Environment Most beginner developers have a hard time understanding virtual environments, why they are useful and how to use them. I am going to explain why you want to use them, and then

There are a few handy functions built into Python to help the developer get more information about an object. help() If you want to get the documentation on an object or function you can use the help()

This is probably my favorite tip to offer. If you haven't heard of Jupyter Notebooks, this is going to be a huge game changer for you. Source While I only use Jupyter Notebooks with Python, I know it can

Python is a dynamic language that does not require you to specify data types as you create variables or supply return types. This makes development a lot easier but can introduce unexpected bugs when things

Counter Counter is a collections object that keeps count of how many times similar values are found. Counter is part of the collections module and is a default package, so you do not need to install it.

This is an easy tip, but an extremely useful feature of Python. Destructuring lists Let's take the following sample list: my_list = ['a', 'b','c'] I want to put each list element into their own variable,

What is a tuple? Tuples are very similar to lists, but it is unable to be changed (immutable). This provides a tiny performance and memory savings. More importantly provides a hint to the interpreter and

This isn't as much of a tip but a walkthrough on how to use slices and all the cool things you can do with them. Slices are a very powerful feature available to Python developers that are worth understanding

PEP what? PEP 8 is a coding standard for Python by Guido van Rossum. It defines a set of guidelines for writing Python code in a universally accepted writing style. Any good developer worth their salt

Another new Python 3.6 feature is the addition of the secrets module, a replacement for random when generating cryptographically strong random numbers. When creating random numbers for with passwords or