You’ve discovered a product that might help you with your job: perhaps a book that will teach you a new and relevant skill, or software that will speed up development. Since you do want to write software better and faster, you are considering buying this product. But, then again, the product costs money, and maybe that money is better spent on something else. So should you buy the product or not? How do you decide? If it is worth buying, […]

This week, we’re joined by Eric Wastl, a Senior Architect at TCGPlayer and the founder of Advent of Code (AoC). Join us as we discuss the inception of AoC, how to avoid common pitfalls when solving code challenges in AoC, and what Eric gets up to in the “3.8 seconds” of free time he has per year. Ricky: Thanks for joining me, Eric. You’re perhaps most well known for being the founder of Advent of Code, which we’ll talk about […]

Conda installs can be very very very slow. Every time you run conda install: It has to collect the package metadata. It has to solve the environment. … maybe you can take a coffee break here, or go work on a jigsaw puzzle to relax … It has to download packages. Eventually, finally, it will install the packages it downloaded. By the time this is all done you’ve probably forgotten what it was you were trying to do in the […]

New versions of Python are now released annually. We can look forward to the core developers sharing a lovely goody bag with the rest of us every October. With Python 3.10, which came out of beta on October 4th, everyone had something exciting to anticipate. Each release of Python has a release manager who’s responsible for coordinating all changes and for building and preparing the files for distribution. The release manager for Python 3.10 and 3.11 is Pablo Galindo Salgado. […]

Taking a Django app from development to production is a demanding but rewarding process. This tutorial will take you through that process step by step, providing an in-depth guide that starts at square one with a no-frills Django application and adds in Gunicorn, Nginx, domain registration, and security-focused HTTP headers. After going over this tutorial, you’ll be better equipped to take your Django app into production and serve it to the world. To make the most out of this tutorial, […]

Sometimes pure Python code isn’t enough, and you need to implement an extension in a compiled language like C, C++, or Rust. Maybe your code is slow, and you need to speed it up. Maybe you just need access to a library written in another language. Depending on your particular situation and needs, you may want to choose a different tool. But which one? Let’s see what your options are, and then go through a variety of scenarios and see […]