Dealing with communications across programs, processes or even threads can be a real pain in the patella. Each situation usually calls for something slightly different and has to work with a limited set of options. On top of that, a lot of tutorials I see are people simply starting one program from inside the other (for … [Read more…]
Thread and Multiprocessing Pools are an underused feature of Python. In my opinion, they are the easiest way to dip your feet into concurrency, and yet still the method I use most often. They allow you to easily offload CPU or I/O bound tasks to a pre-instantiated group (pool) of threads or processes. One of … [Read more…]
Is Python more suited for EAFP or LBYL coding styles? It has been debated across message boards, email chains, stackoverflow, twitter and workplaces. It’s not as heated as some other battles; like how spaces are better than tabs, or that nano is indisputably the best terminal editor ; but people seem to have their own … [Read more…]
Boring Background I have always had in interest in making a local photo organization tool, that supports albums and tagging the way I want to do it. Maybe down the line allowing others to connect and use it too. So I started on one a few years ago, using what I knew best, Python REST … [Read more…]
Often times in python there comes a need to have multiple functions act in a similar manner. It could be anything from making sure that similar functions output the right type of result, they all log when they are called or all report exceptions in the same way. An easy and repeatable way to accomplish … [Read more…]
Ok, so you’ve familiarized yourself with the rules. Good. This isn’t Fight Club, but they are important rules. You want to be a professional in all the projects on which you want to participate. If properly managed, your GitHub account should be a functional part of your ever-evolving resume. Code organization: So, code itself really isn’t hard … [Read more…]
Everyone loves Python’s dictionaries; they’re fast, easy to create and quite handy for a range of reasons. However, there are times that [“typing”][“out”][“all”][“those”] extra quotes and brackets seems excessive. Wouldn’t it be nicer to access.them.like.class.methods? Say hello to box.
| 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 | from box import Box movie_data = { "movies": { "Spaceballs": { "imdb_stars": 7.1, "rating": "PG", "length": 96, "Director": "Mel Brooks", "Stars": [{"name": "Mel Brooks", "imdb": "nm0000316", "role": "President Skroob"}, {"name": "John Candy","imdb": "nm0001006", "role": "Barf"}, {"name": "Rick Moranis", "imdb": "nm0001548", "role": "Dark Helmet"} ] }, "Robin Hood: Men in Tights": { "imdb_stars": 6.7, "rating": "PG-13", "length": 104, "Director": "Mel Brooks", "Stars": [ {"name": "Cary Elwes", "imdb": "nm0000144", "role": "Robin Hood"}, {"name": "Richard Lewis", "imdb": "nm0507659", "role": "Prince John"}, {"name": "Roger Rees", "imdb": "nm0715953", "role": "Sheriff of Rottingham"}, {"name": "Amy Yasbeck", "imdb": "nm0001865", "role": "Marian"} ] } } } my_box = Box(movie_data) my_box.movies.Spaceballs.rating 'PG' my_box.movies.Spaceballs.Stars[0].name 'Mel Brooks' my_box.movies.Spaceballs.Stars[0] # <Box: {'name': 'Mel Brooks', 'imdb': 'nm0000316', 'role': 'President Skroob'}> |
Box is a creation I made over three years ago, originally in the reusables code base … [Read more…]
Python is awesome, and can pretty much do everything you ever wanted, but on rare occasion, you may want to call an external program. The original way to do this with Python was to use os.system.
| 1 2 3 | import os return_code = os.system("echo 'May the force be with you'") |
The message “May the force be with you” would be printed to the terminal via stdout, and the return … [Read more…]
Reusables 0.8 has just been released, and it’s about time I give it a proper introduction. I started this project three years ago, with a simple goal of keeping code that I inevitably end up reusing grouped into a single library. It’s for the stuff that’s too small to do well as it’s own library, … [Read more…]
For many of us, as we develop as coders, we want to continue to grow our knowledge. We pour over the standard library (STL) of this wonderful language, looking for hidden gems. There are many such gems in the Python STL. Such as all the fun things you can do with sets and itertools. But … [Read more…]