Python is a general purpose programming language, used for a variety of tasks across a number of industries.
In recent years Python has become increasingly popular due to it's good cross platform support combined with applicability to tasks in a number of areas:
I saw this post over on Linkedin: I think what is seen to be intuitive will depend heavily on how much the people reading the code are…
Published on July 11th, 2020 by Janis Lesinskis.One of the not so nice things about legacy installable python packages is the executable nature of setup.py files. This means amongst other things that you can't reliably determine the contents of some setup.py files without arbitrary code execution. This is what led to PEP 518 which specified a declarative metadata format that can be stored in easy to parse file. Updating is a pain though, but thankfully there's some tooling that makes this easier as I found out recently.
Published on May 11th, 2020 by Janis Lesinskis.Since Python 3.4 you have been able to run pip as though it were a Python module, this actually prevents a variety of annoying issues from occurring.
Published on November 3rd, 2019 by Janis Lesinskis.When you are developing in Python it can be handy to drop into an interactive Read Evaluate Print Loop (REPL) shell. Being able to drop into…
Published on July 29th, 2019 by Janis Lesinskis.PEP 479 changed how Python handled generators in a backwards incompatible manner, here's how to get compatible code working from Python 3.5+
Published on July 3rd, 2019 by Janis Lesinskis.I was bumping some versions for the Persephone project today to try remove some security issues from the project dependencies. Package…
Published on June 28th, 2019 by Janis Lesinskis.A good strategy when managing your packages is to have a strategy for deprecating functionality across versions. This way developers get…
Published on June 27th, 2019 by Janis Lesinskis.When using Jupyter notebooks have you found the styling of code cells to be too visually similar to Raw NBConvert cells? We found the similarities in formatting made it visually harder to see when a cell was set to the wrong cell type when we were running workshops and editing our own data science notebooks. Here's how we changed it.
Published on March 27th, 2019 by Janis Lesinskis.Have you ever found the autocompletion of certain characters like brackets or quotes to be an annoyance in Jupyter? If so here's how to change the configuration to disable this.
Published on March 24th, 2019 by Janis Lesinskis.One thing you may want to do is to capture all of the standard output stream from a cell in a Jupyter notebook. You might also not want to change your code, here's how you can do that...
Published on March 9th, 2019 by Janis Lesinskis.Wondered what those and things are in your Jupyter notebooks and how to make use of them?
Published on March 8th, 2019 by Janis Lesinskis.When you have used Python a lot you'll notice that you will use tools such as you are installing some python code in a way that can be…
Published on December 17th, 2018 by Janis Lesinskis.On Thursday I presented a talk about how CPython manages memory at the Melbourne Python Users Group. After introducing the notion of a…
Published on November 17th, 2018 by Janis Lesinskis.You want to deal with bulk data from your Python program. You realise that looping over every cell of a huge array from your Python code would be silly. You also would like the convenience of many kinds of canned routine to transform your data easily and efficiently. Enter NumPy!
Published on September 16th, 2018 by Nick Downing.Ever wondered exactly much memory in bytes an arbitrary Python object requires?
Published on September 4th, 2018 by Janis Lesinskis.Last night Robbie Clarken presented a great talk about Mocking and how it fits in with testing in general. There were a few questions he had over email about how mypy could be used in addition to Mocking to get better coverage of issues with parameters in function calls being tested. Seeing as this is helping him with a real process we agreed that there's value in blogging this so a wider audience can get exposure to these techniques.
Published on July 20th, 2018 by Janis Lesinskis.You may have noticed that Python has an internal hash method, here’s why it is not suitable as a cryptographic hash and some suggestions for alternatives if you do need a cryptographic hash.
Published on July 14th, 2018 by Janis Lesinskis.Recently we have been using a lot of Tensorflow in projects. As far as libraries go it's really quite nice, however it's not a native Python…
Published on June 26th, 2018 by Janis Lesinskis.Ever needed to limit how long your unit tests can run for? Here's an easy way to do that with pytest. There's a package called pytest…
Published on June 23rd, 2018 by Janis Lesinskis.The other day I got asked what the cache locality of lists in CPython was and how the lists are layed out in memory. Because I always tend…
Published on June 18th, 2018 by Janis Lesinskis.Recently I've been working on a web API with Flask, here's how I went about making unit tests with pytest work well with Flask and testing the API via requests.
Published on May 27th, 2018 by Janis Lesinskis.There was a perplexing issue we ran into when testing the Persephone web API. There was a foreign key constraint specified in SQLAlchemy but you could add in new entries with bogus foreign keys without the DB engine raising an . Why did this happen?
Published on May 7th, 2018 by Janis Lesinskis.We have been working on projects in JavaScript and Python a fair bit lately. In the past we ported a few legacy PHP apps over to newer…
Published on April 23rd, 2018 by Janis Lesinskis.This is a bit of Python trivia but Python containers can store items that are self references.
Published on April 22nd, 2018 by Janis Lesinskis.You want to be able to get good logging data from your applications to be able to reduce the amount of time that you require in order to fix issues and debug problems. This is especially important for any unhandled exceptions that crash the program. This tutorial will show you a convenient way of making sure these are logged.
Published on February 6th, 2018 by Janis Lesinskis.