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 »
Python fairly recently added partial support for function overloading in Python 3.4. They did this by adding a neat little decorator to the functools module called singledispatch. This decorator will transform your regular function into a single dispatch generic function. Note however that singledispatch only happens based on the first argument’s type. Let’s take a
Python 3 – Function Overloading with singledispatch 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
PyDev of the Week: Cyrille Rossant Read More »
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
PyDev of the Week: Mike Bayer Read More »
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
The Python 101 Screencast has been finished for a little over a month now and I am now releasing it for general consumption. The Python 101 Screencast is based on my book, Python 101. I went through all 44 chapters of the book and turned each of them into a standalone screencast. In other words,
Python 101 Screencast Released Read More »
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
PyDev of the Week: Chris Withers Read More »
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 »
The other day, I came across this interesting experimental package called import_from_github_com. The package uses the new import hooks provided in PEP 302 to basically allow you to import a package from github. What the package actually appears to do is install the package and add it to locals. Anyway, you need Python 3.2 or
Python 3 – Import from github 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
PyDev of the Week: Oliver Schoenborn Read More »
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 »