This article appeared first as a Pybites email. To receive this kind of content first, subscribe to our weekly newsletter. For a long time, I thought I should not make mistakes when teaching other developers. I would hide behind slides because they were “hardcoded”, safe, or I’d do a lot of editing of my coding… Continue reading Teachers aren’t the only ones who teach. As a developer you’re expected to do so too …
Bob Belderbos
Bob studied business economics, but got fired up about programming early in his career. He taught himself web design / coding and started living his biggest passion: automate the boring stuff, making other people's lives easier. Since then he has coded projects accruing millions in cost savings and built a coding platform that has taught Python to thousands of people worldwide. He deeply cares about helping other people succeed. His biggest win will be your next win!
Reflections on the Zen of Python
By Bob Belderbos on 21 December 2022
An initial version of this article appeared as a Pybites email first. If you like it join our friends list to get our valuable Python, developer and mindset content first … How following the Zen of Python will make your code better, a lot better. This epic set of axioms (triggered by typing import this in the… Continue reading Reflections on the Zen of Python
Building a 500 line API regression test suite
By Bob Belderbos on 15 December 2022
This article appeared as a Pybites email first. If you like it consider joining our friends list for weekly Python, developer and (!) mindset content … Last year I built a cool API to post code images using our pybites-carbon tool. It will store the tip code in a database and store the code image in an… Continue reading Building a 500 line API regression test suite
5 ways I use GitHub Actions
By Bob Belderbos on 14 December 2022
I am increasingly using GitHub Actions these days. If you’re new to this you might want to check out our article or video. In this article I will show you 5 cool ways I use it day to day. Run tests and linters The first and most obvious reason is to automate tooling. Although you probably want to… Continue reading 5 ways I use GitHub Actions
How to create a self updating GitHub Readme
By Bob Belderbos on 21 November 2022
It was about time to give my GitHub profile a nice intro so inspired by Simon Willison’s blog post I decided to make an intro Readme that auto-updates. First I made a GitHub repo called bbelderbos, my username. That’s how it works: GitHub defaults to showing the Readme.md of your username’s repo on your profile page.… Continue reading How to create a self updating GitHub Readme
Finding new and removed Python 3.11 modules in 8 lines of code
By Bob Belderbos on 9 November 2022
In our TIL Slack channel AJ shared a cool new find: Today I learned about sys.stdlib_module_names: a frozenset of strings containing the names of standard library modules. … AJ on the Pybites Slack – TIL (today-I-learned) channel So I thought to give it a little test drive, specifically checking for modules that were added and… Continue reading Finding new and removed Python 3.11 modules in 8 lines of code
Tips for clean code in Python
By Bob Belderbos on 8 November 2022
In this article I will give you 10 tips for cleaner code. Hope this helps improve your Python code. 1. Smaller units. Break long functions (methods) into multiple smaller ones that do one thing (SRP or “Single-responsibility principle”). This will make your code more modular and easier to test. For example, a function that parses… Continue reading Tips for clean code in Python
Single or double quotes in Python?
By Bob Belderbos on 20 September 2022
Whatever you think about Twitter these days, it’s pretty handy for us developers to ask questions and get inputs 💡 Last week I asked about single vs double quotes in Python: I thought double quotes were a given, black – “The Uncompromising Code Formatter”, defaults to them and I personally find them pleasant to the eye.… Continue reading Single or double quotes in Python?
A super simple Zettelkasten note taking system
By Bob Belderbos on 7 September 2022
Yesterday I found this amazing gist that got me running with Zettelkasten in no time 💪 Check out this short YouTube video where the author demos this workflow: As the Zen of Python wisely taught us: Simple is better than complex – and this is so true for what can easily be an overwhelming task… Continue reading A super simple Zettelkasten note taking system
Making plots in your terminal with plotext
By Bob Belderbos on 22 August 2022
In this blog post a quick script to plot the frequency of our blog articles in the terminal. It’s good to see that we’re getting back on track 🙂 The code gist is here. First we import the libraries we are going to use. As always we separate Standard Library modules from 3rd party ones… Continue reading Making plots in your terminal with plotext