When you’re running a CPU-intensive parallel program, you often want to have a thread or process pool sized by the number of CPU cores on your machine. Fewer threads and you’re not taking advantage of all the cores, more than that and your program will start running slower as multiple threads compete for the same core. Or that’s the theory, anyway. So how do you check how many cores your computer has? And is this actually good advice? It turns […]

Adding a database to your Flask project comes with many advantages. By connecting a database, you’ll be able to store user information, monitor user interactions, and maintain dynamic site content. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a robust understanding of how to connect your Flask app to a database and how to leverage this connection to expand your project’s capabilities. Prerequisites You’ll gain the most value from this tutorial if you’ve already created one or more Flask web […]

Flask is a powerful and flexible micro web framework for Python, ideal for both small and large web projects. It provides a straightforward way to get a web application up and running, with all the features that you need to get started. Over the course of this tutorial, you’ll explore the process of creating a boilerplate for a Flask web project. This boilerplate will serve as a great starting point for any scalable Flask web app that you wish to […]

November brought exciting news to the Python community, from PyPI’s first security audit to a new version of PyScript! The month also gave Python developers like you ample opportunities to get involved in the ecosystem through the annual Python Developers Survey and the PyCon US call for proposals. Development has also continued on Python 3.13 and Pydantic. Get ready to explore the recent highlights! PyPI Completes First Security Audit With the support of the Open Technology Fund (OTF), the Python […]

Wouldn’t it be cool to build a hangman game with a nice graphical user interface (GUI) in Python? Maybe you’ve built a text-based user interface version of hangman, and now you want to make an even more attractive game. For you as a Python programmer, building a GUI version of this game can be a rewarding challenge that can take you to the next skill level. Throughout this tutorial, you’ll build the hangman game in Python in a series of […]

Whether you’re a data scientist crunching big data in a distributed cluster, a back-end engineer building scalable microservices, or a front-end developer consuming web APIs, you should understand data serialization. In this comprehensive guide, you’ll move beyond XML and JSON to explore several data formats that you can use to serialize data in Python. You’ll explore them based on their use cases, learning about their distinct categories. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a deep understanding of the […]

Polars is a dataframe-based library that can be faster, more memory efficient, and often simpler to use than Pandas. It’s also much newer, and correspondingly less popular. In November 2023: Polars had ~2.6 million downloads from PyPI. Pandas had ~140 million downloads! Because of Pandas’ popularity and decade and a half of availability, there are many third-party libraries with built-in support for Pandas, and others that specifically extend Pandas. Many plotting and visualization libraries will accept Pandas dataframes as an […]