Topic Archive

Tips

  • How do you know if you’re actually growing as a dev? Last week I was chatting with a developer who’d hit a wall. (I talk to a lot of devs now that I think about it!) Like him, you might consider yourself a scrappy coder. You’re an all-rounder, can generally figure things out and write […]


  • There are few things in software engineering that induce panic quite like a massive git merge conflict. You pull down the latest code, open your editor, and suddenly your screen is bleeding with <<<<<<< HEAD markers. Your logic is tangled with someone else’s, the CSS is conflicting, and you realise you just wasted hours building […]


  • Python generators provide an elegant mechanism for handling iteration, particularly for large datasets where traditional approaches may be memory-intensive. Unlike standard functions that compute and return all values at once, generators produce values on demand through the yield statement, enabling efficient memory usage and creating new possibilities for data processing workflows. Generator Function Mechanics At […]


  • A few examples that will save the day probably* 95% of time. *I don’t have the actual data but seriously, I bet you’ll find those tips useful more often than not! Introduction This article was originally posted on Medium. I use f-strings every day. The irony is I also every day end up searching the Web to […]


  • Virtual environments are vital if you’re developing Python apps or just writing some Python scripts. They allow you to isolate different app requirements to prevent conflicts and keep your global OS environment clean. This is super important for many reasons. The most obvious one is requirements isolation. Let’s say that you’re working on two different […]


  • In this article let’s look at the functools Standard Library module and 6 cool things you can do with it (be warned, a lot of decorators are coming your way! 😍) … 1. Cache (“memoize”) things You can use the @cache decorator (formerly called @lru_cache) as a “simple lightweight unbounded function cache”. The classic example is […]


  • A challenge in software development is to keep things simple 🤯 For your code to not grow overly complex over time 😱 Simple is better than complex.Complex is better than complicated. Zen of Python 🐍 Simplicity in your code means fewer possibilities for bugs to hide and easier debugging when they do arise 📈 It […]


  • Python allows you to use *args and **kwargs in function definitions to accept an arbitrary number of positional and keyword arguments, respectively. Here is a simple example: Different types of function arguments In the above example, the arbitrary_args function is defined to accept any number of positional and keyword arguments using the *args and **kwargs […]


  • In the world of programming, errors are inevitable. But how we choose to handle these errors can make the difference between a system that is robust and user-friendly and one that is fraught with ambiguous issues 😱 The Zen of Python famously states, “Errors should never pass silently.” This principle emphasizes the importance of addressing […]


  • Testing membership and empty strings

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    2 min read

    I was working on one of the exercises on the Pybites platform (Bite 29) and encountered a situation I didn’t understand. I needed to check a set of inputs to see if they were alphanumeric or not as part of the solution to the exercise. I succeeded in all but one test, but I couldn’t […]