When your Python code is too slow, you need to identify the bottleneck that’s causing it: you need to understand what your code is doing. Luckily, beyond pre-existing profiling tools, there are also a variety of ways you can poke and prod Python programs to get a better understanding of what they’re doing internally. This allows you to do one-time introspection, add profiling facilities to your program that you can turn on and off, build custom tools, and in general […]

Absolute values are commonly used in mathematics, physics, and engineering. Although the school definition of an absolute value might seem straightforward, you can actually look at the concept from many different angles. If you intend to work with absolute values in Python, then you’ve come to the right place. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to: Implement the absolute value function from scratch Use the built-in abs() function in Python Calculate the absolute values of numbers Call abs() on NumPy […]

GitHub Copilot is a thrilling new technology that promises to deliver to your code editor a virtual assistant powered by artificial intelligence, and it stirred up considerable controversy when it was released to the general public. Python is among the languages that are particularly well-supported by this tool. After reading this tutorial, you’ll know whether GitHub Copilot is a risk, a gimmick, or a true game changer in software engineering. To continue with this tutorial, you need to have a […]

When your software is too slow in production, how can you figure out the source of the problem? One common starting point to improving production observability is logging, and ideally trace-based logging (tracing for short). For example, the OpenTelemetry standard and the libraries and backend services that work with it can help you collect metrics, logs, and traces. Tracing—both within and across processes—is the most general of these, immensely useful for identifying and debugging problems, including performance problems. But there’s […]

# samples.py dictionary_of_dictionaries = { 1: {“first_name”: “Dorthea”, “last_name”: “Emmanuele”, “age”: 29}, 2: {“first_name”: “Evelina”, “last_name”: “Ferras”, “age”: 91}, 3: {“first_name”: “Frederica”, “last_name”: “Livesay”, “age”: 99}, 4: {“first_name”: “Murray”, “last_name”: “Linning”, “age”: 36}, 5: {“first_name”: “Annette”, “last_name”: “Garioch”, “age”: 93},

In July 2022, Python reached for the stars, playing a key role in processing data from the James Webb Space Telescope. After two years of virtual conferences, EuroPython 2022 took place in Dublin, Ireland. Anaconda celebrated its tenth birthday, and Flask achieved a major milestone on GitHub. Two new pre-release versions of Python 3.11 were released, with 3.11.0b5 representing the final beta version. Meanwhile, the Python Package Index (PyPI) introduced a two-factor authentication requirement for maintainers of critical projects. Finally, […]

In programming, the term constant refers to names representing values that don’t change during a program’s execution. Constants are a fundamental concept in programming, and Python developers use them in many cases. However, Python doesn’t have a dedicated syntax for defining constants. In practice, Python constants are just variables that never change. To prevent programmers from reassigning a name that’s supposed to hold a constant, the Python community has adopted a naming convention: use uppercase letters. For every Pythonista, it’s […]

Your customers are complainin’, your monitors are alertin’, your thumbs are a-twiddlin’—whatever the symptom, the problem is that your application is too slow. And you want to find out why, so you can fix it. You could spin up your application on your laptop, do some benchmarking, and try to find the bottleneck. Sometimes, that’s all it takes, but quite often, local testing tells you nothing useful. For many performance bottlenecks, the only way to identify the problem is to […]