Even though web and mobile applications appear to have taken over the software development market, there’s still demand for traditional graphical user interface (GUI) desktop applications. If you’re interested in building these kinds of applications in Python, then you’ll find a wide variety of libraries to choose from. They include Tkinter, wxPython, PyQt, PySide, and a few others. In this tutorial, you’ll learn the basics of building GUI desktop applications with Python and PyQt. For this tutorial, you’ll create a […]

Python’s built-in exec() function allows you to execute arbitrary Python code from a string or compiled code input. The exec() function can be handy when you need to run dynamically generated Python code, but it can be pretty dangerous if you use it carelessly. In this tutorial, you’ll learn not only how to use exec(), but just as importantly, when it’s okay to use this function in your code. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to: Work with Python’s built-in […]

If you’re new to programming or come from a programming language other than Python, you may be looking for the best way to check whether a string contains another string in Python. Identifying such substrings comes in handy when you’re working with text content from a file or after you’ve received user input. You may want to perform different actions in your program depending on whether a substring is present or not. In this tutorial, you’ll focus on the most […]

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 […]