You have a large CSV, you’re going to be reading it in to Pandas—but every time you load it, you have to wait for the CSV to load. And that slows down your development feedback loop, and might meaningfully slows down your production processing. But it’s faster to read the data in faster. Let’s see how. In this article we’ll cover: Pandas’ default CSV reading. The faster, more parallel CSV reader introduced in v1.4. A different approach that can make […]

If you’re writing modern Python code with Python 3, you’ll probably want to format your strings with Python f-strings. However, if you’re working with older Python codebases, you’re likely to encounter the string modulo operator for string formatting. If you’re reading or writing Python 2 code, it’ll help if you’re familiar with this technique. Because the syntax still works in Python 3, you might even see developers use it in modern Python codebases. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to: […]

Python is not the fastest programming language. So when you need to process a large amount of homogeneous data quickly, you’re told to rely on “vectorization.” This leads to more questions: What does “vectorization” actually mean? When does it apply? How does vectorization actually make code faster? To answer that question, we’ll consider interesting performance metrics, learn some useful facts about how CPUs work, and discover that NumPy developers are working hard to make your code faster. What “vectorization” means, […]

Building small projects, like a text-based user interface (TUI) dice-rolling application, will help you level up your Python programming skills. You’ll learn how to gather and validate the user’s input, import code from modules and packages, write functions, use for loops and conditionals, and neatly display output by using strings and the print() function. In this project, you’ll code an application that simulates dice-rolling events. To do so, you’ll use Python’s random module. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to: […]

In December 2021, the fourth Python steering council was elected, as usual with a mix of new and returning members. Python’s release-cycle circle of life kept spinning, with new iterations of both Python 3.10 and the upcoming Python 3.11 released. At the same time, the popular Python 3.6 reached end-of-life and will no longer be supported. Amid this flurry of activity, developers from all over had some fun over the holidays by solving the annual Advent of Code puzzles. Let’s […]

If you’re writing high-performance code, what matters is how many CPU instructions you run. Right? That’s what I learned long ago in school, anyway, when I took algorithms and data structures classes. The basic assumption was that reading or writing to memory took a small, constant amount of time, and so you could focus on how many operations were being done. This was so fundamental to how we were taught that we didn’t even have to write real code: pseudo-code […]

In this four-part tutorial series, you’re building a social network with Django that you can showcase in your portfolio. This project is strengthening your understanding of relationships between Django models and showing you how to use forms so that users can interact with your app and with each other. You’re also making your site look good by using the Bulma CSS framework. In the previous part of this series, you added functionality so that users can create dweets on the […]