There are several 3rd party packages that wrap Twitter’s API. We’ll be looking at tweepy and twitter. The tweepy documentation is a bit more extensive than twitter’s, but I felt that the twitter package had more concrete examples. Let’s spend some time going over how to use these packages!
How to Connect to Twitter with Python Read More »
I’ve been hearing some buzz about a newish web service called Twilio which allows you to send SMS and MMS messages among other things. There’s a handy Python wrapper to their REST API as well. If you sign up with Twilio, they will give you a trial account without even requiring you to provide a
Python 101: How to send SMS/MMS with Twilio Read More »
My first book, Python 101 is on sale this month. You can get it on Amazon US for $2.99 or you can buy it for 50% off via my website. To get 50% off, just enter the following offer code at checkout: fall2014
Python 101 on Sale for September Read More »
Recently I wrote about the arrow project and one of my readers mentioned that another datetime related project known as Delorean. So in this article, we’ll spend some time going over the delorean project. This will be a high level article as there is no reason to rewrite the delorean’s documentation.
Python – Taking Time with Delorean Read More »
The wxPython GUI toolkit includes its own date / time capabilities. Most of the time, you can just use Python’s datetime and time modules and you’ll be fine. But occasionally you’ll find yourself needing to convert from wxPython’s wx.DateTime objects to Python’s datetime objects. You may encounter this when you use the wx.DatePickerCtrl widget. Fortunately,
wxPython: Converting wx.DateTime to Python datetime Read More »
The other day, I saw an interesting question on StackOverflow where the author asked if there was a way to serialize a Python dictionary into a human-readable format. The answer that was given was to use a package called jsonpickle, which will serialize complex Python objects to and from JSON. This article will give you
jsonpickle: Turning Python pickles into JSON Read More »
The other day, I came across an article about a fork of the pbs package called sh. These packages are wrappers for Python’s subprocess module. Basically sh allows you to import and use shell commands directly from Python. This article will go over a few examples to show you how to use this fun little
The new sh Package – A subprocess wrapper Read More »
The arrow project is an attempt to wrap Python’s time and datetime modules into a single API. It also claims to plug gaps in functionality in those modules, such as time spans, ISO-8601 and humanization. You can kind of think of arrow as a drop-in replacement for Python’s datetime and time modules, much like the
arrow – A new date / time package for Python Read More »
The Pony ORM project is another object relational mapper package for Python. They allow you to query a database using generators. They also have an online ER Diagram Editor that is supposed to help you create a model. When I first started using PonyORM, they were one of the only Python packages I’ve seen with
Python 101: An Intro to Pony ORM Read More »
I thought it would be fun to try out a few different Python object relational mappers (ORMs) besides SQLAlchemy. I recently stumbled across a project known as peewee. For this article, we will take the examples from my SQLAlchemy tutorial and port it to peewee to see how it stands up. The peewee project supports
An Intro to peewee – Another Python ORM Read More »
Redirecting stdout seems to be a pretty common request on the wxPython users group, so I decided to see how easy it would be to do it with Tkinter. The typical use case for redirecting stdout or stderr is that you are calling some other process (like ping or tracert) and you want to catch
Tkinter – Redirecting stdout / stderr Read More »
I’ve been using wxPython for quite a while now and I see certain questions come up on a fairly frequent basis. One of the popular ones is how to ask the user for their credentials before loading up the rest of the application. There are several approaches to this, but I am going to focus
wxPython: How to Create a Login Dialog Read More »
Yesterday, Philip Guo made the claim that Python is now the most popular introductory teaching language at top U.S. universities on the Communications of the ACM blog. I came across this information via Planet Python’s redistribution of Vasudev Ram’s blog post on the subject. If this is true, then I think this is really cool.
Python Most Popular University Teaching Language? Read More »
Packt Publishing recently asked me if I would be interested in letting my readers know about a sale that they are doing right now. Most of the time, I avoid marketing to my readers, but Packt has a lot of Python ebooks for sale this week that I think you might find useful. Here is
Packt Publishing is having a Sale on Python books this week Read More »
Last week, DZone contacted me to ask if I would like to be featured in their “Dev of the Week” series. In other words, they wanted to do a short interview with me. The interview went live yesterday. You can read it here, if you like: http://java.dzone.com/articles/dev-week-mike-driscoll I don’t know why the link is on
My First Interview Read More »