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I occasionally enjoy solving algorithmic problems, for example Project Euler or The Advent of Code. I’ve been doing them since I was a pimply PHP-slinging teenager, competing with my peers across the UK in the British Informatics Olympiad. It was terribly nerdy and terribly fun.
I was at PyCon Namibia in Windhoek from the 19th to 21st of February, and had an amazing time! PyCon Namibia is one of the longest running PyCons in Africa, this being its fifth edition in as many years.
I’ve recently dropped Python 2 support from most of the open source projects I maintain. Python 2 support ends 2020-01-01 (see pythonclock.org), and many major projects have signed the Python 3 Statement that declares that they will remove Python 2 support before, so this year is crunch time for migration.
It’s quite common to want to pip install a version of a package that hasn’t been released to PyPI, but is available on its Git repository host, such as GitHub. If the package is pure Python or has a relatively simple build process, you can normally install it directly via Git.
The TV program Black Mirror released an interactive choose-your-own-adventure film on Netflix called Bandersnatch over the holiday period. I enjoyed playing through it and finding the various endings, especially since I recently played The Stanley Parable which is in the same genre but with more humour. Bandersnatch has many endings and easter eggs, so naturally there’s a whole subreddit dedicated to tracking them down. The most impressive is an embedded Spectrum tape noise containing a QR code that leads to a real ZX Spectrum game made in 2018 by developer Matt Wescott.
This is a problem I've seen several times over the past few years.
My plugin pytest-randomly was recently moved into the pytest-dev organization on GitHub, making it a bit “more official” as a pytest plugin. Thanks to Bruno Oliveira for suggesting it, Florian Bruhin and Bruno for approving it on the pytest-dev mailing list, and Gordon Wrigley for helping with its development.
Django’s ORM is normally fast enough as-is, but if you’ve ever profiled a high traffic view with a fairly complicated query, you might have found that constructing QuerySet can take a noticeable portion of your request time. For example, I once found a query on the front page of the site I was working on that took 1ms to construct and 1ms for the database to answer. With a performance budget of 100ms, that was 1% gone on computing the exactly same SQL.
I maintain a few Python projects on Github + PyPI. I try to keep them as consistent and error-free as possible and thus running code quality tools (known as ‘linters’) such as flake8 and isort to ensure this happens. I also discovered the lesser known python setup.py check which has found a number of problems I otherwise wouldn’t have found until release time - highly recommended!
We recently upgraded our 160,000 lines of backend Python code from Python 2 to Python 3. We did with zero downtime and no major errors! Here’s how we did it, hopefully it will help anyone else still stuck on Python 2!
Python 3 includes a faster re-implementation of the decimal standard library, called cdecimal. How much faster?
My last blog post was written in IPython notebook, and my blog is in Jekyll. Here’s how I hooked the two up.
Let’s learn about nothing. More particularly, let’s learnt about python’s concept of representing nothing, None. This is the most nothingest concept of nothing as well - for example, zero is nothing, but it’s also a number, so it still has some information. Other names for nothing from other programming languages include null, nil, or Nothing.
I was recently tasked with keeping the various repeating jobs running for our data scientists at YPlan. They have a number of nightly or weekly jobs to be run, such as creating summary tables of the day’s various activity logs, pulling in data from third party services, and so on.
Here are some great little Python libraries that have made my life (well, at least the coding part) a little bit nicer and easier. They mostly add neat syntax and a few things that you always wanted to do, but never knew.