Learning Python Decorators by Example

Decorators are a sometimes overlooked feature and they might be hard to grasp for beginning Pythonistas. I agree with Aaron Maxwell that mastering them “can massively magnify the positive impact of the code you write”, so make sure you add them to your toolkit if not done so already. In this article I explain what they do, why you want to use them and give some practical examples.

PyBites Module of the Week: Openpyxl – Automate Excel!

You probably remember your first script. I remember the joy of discovering how I could let the machine automate something for me. It still gets me excited everyday. I played a bit with openpyxl yesterday. I used it to hack an Excel game for which I first used a macro. Not particularly useful but a nice exploration of this module.

Improve the Quality of Your Code with Better Code Hub

So you pushed your code to GitHub and deployed v1, congrats! But how maintainable is your code really? Do you have tests? Is your code modular? Are your methods short and concise? What if you could hit a button and a tool conveniently checks this for you? Free and integrated with GitHub? Enter Better Code Hub from Software Improvement Group …

Using Pillow to Create Nice Banners For Your Site

Running your site or business good chance you A. use promo material like banners and B. you make them manually with Photoshop, Gimp or what not. And yes for anything beyond the basics you probably need those programs. But what if you like to keep it simple and want to semi-automate things? Just an image and text on canvas? Enter Pillow – The friendly PIL fork, which makes this pretty easy. Come explore some of its capabilities with me in this article.

First Steps Learning Django: PyPlanet Article Sharer App

In this post I share my first steps exploring Django. I created PyPlanet Article Sharer Django App to make it easier for us to share new Planet Python feed articles. It loads in new articles and generates tweet links. It lets us mark each entry as Shared or Skipped. I am sure this will facilitate our Twitter activity and News Digests. This is our first project of our 100 days of Django and our very first Django app overall!