Articles on Bites of Py

Best Practices, Concepts

The Mutable Trap: Avoiding Unintended Side Effects in Python

By on 3 February 2025

Ever had a Python function behave strangely, remembering values between calls when it shouldn’t? You’re not alone! This is one of Python’s sneakiest pitfalls—mutable default parameters. Recently someone asked for help in our Pybites Circle Community with a Bite exercise that seemed to be behaving unexpectedly. It turned out that this was a result of modifying a mutable parameter… Continue reading The Mutable Trap: Avoiding Unintended Side Effects in Python

Tips

There is More Than One Way to Solve a Bite Exercise

By on 21 August 2020

According to the Zen of Python, “There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.” It’s a good principle for designing a program: the more ways there are of doing something, the more confusing the software becomes, along with a host of other problems. In reality, though, there almost always is more than one way to accomplish something. The quotation even displays this fact: it places the dash in two different ways, neither of which are the obvious way.

Code Challenges

Watch Me Code – Solving Bite 21. Query a Nested Data Structure

By on 14 July 2018

I recorded a video solving Bite 21. Query a nested data structure. The exercise presents us with a dictionary of car manufacturers and their corresponding car models. We will extract various bits and pieces from it as well as sort the nested model lists. This is a common type of data structure so specially for a beginner it is important to have this become second nature. Prepare to learn more about looping, some string operations, and list / dict comprehensions.