The first step to offloading a task is writing down how to complete it. Once the process is typed into a lean text file or wiki page, it can be learned by another human. This helps your team, but what’s in it for you? The most selfish programmers probably want to free up their time […]
These are a few of my favorite PEPs, or Python Enhancements Proposals I’ve encountered recently. PEP 0, PEP 8 and PEP 20 are great reads for those aspiring to hone their Python skills. The documentation sometimes references specific PEPs directly also. They document Python’s evolution over time and the rationale behind it. Here are some […]
This is an example of how to cast a Python dict into a dataframe and vice versa. I picked up the df to dict part from this Python and R tips post and the dict to df part from a Stack Overflow post. The below adaptation begins by converting an “NFL quarterbacks” Python dictionary into […]
Below are two practical Python libraries for text processing. This function uses textblob’s spelling correction along with language_tool_python, which applies grammatical corrections via the Language Tool API. I added these text processing transformations into my concept text generation app. These are free, public APIs up to around 20 requests per second. You can send both […]
This command can be used to upgrade your Python requests library with pip, Python’s package manager. It is tailored for a PythonAnywhere environment. I suppose this command works on any Bash console, but if you’re running your app with pythonanywhere, you can find the bash console here: https://www.pythonanywhere.com/user/your_username/consoles/ Install requests with this command: Substitute in […]
Who is the world’s greatest footballer, Messi or Ronaldo? EA Sports surely has calculated the answer to this question in their player ratings. They rate peak Crisitiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Luka Modrić at 99 overall, with Neymar and Lewandowski at 98. Anecdotally, Messi has won 7 Ballon d’Or, the highest individual football honor one […]
Yesterday, I experienced a flow state where I became manically obsessed with perfecting a script I was working on. I think it’s beautiful code, about 100 lines long without docstrings. It solves a real need and it felt great to write it. Some scripts feel terrible to write and you know they’re bad. However, this […]
Pandas is amazing, what else is there to say? Learning the nuances of its API have yielded tons of times where it helped me get stuff done. I recently picked up the pandas dataframe’s “assign” function for creating a new column of values. This is an elegant way to set a column of values in […]
Every Python programmer has undoubtedly come across some crazy characters. The ftfy library “Fixes Text For You” and acts like a swiss army knife when you’ve got questionable characters breaking your script. In my case, an HTTP request was failing because of weird cryptic letters hiding in the data when it was only supposed to […]
Did your script run to completion? Sure, you might log some tracebacks along the way or terminate the program early with sys.exit(). But did your script actually run completely to the end? I have yet to use the Trace module but it seems worth checking out also. Visualization tools like heartrate are worth mentioning too […]
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