Processing large amounts of data with Pandas can be difficult; it’s quite easy to run out of memory and either slow down or crash. The Polars dataframe library is a potential solution. While Polars is mostly known for running faster than Pandas, if you use it right it can sometimes also significantly reduce memory usage compared to Pandas. In particular, certain techniques that you need to do manually in Pandas can be done automatically in Polars, allowing you to process […]

If you’re working with geospatial data in Python, then you might want to quickly visualize that data on a map. Python’s Folium library gives you access to the mapping strengths of the Leaflet JavaScript library through a Python API. It allows you to create interactive geographic visualizations that you can share as a website. You’ll build the web map shown below, which displays the ecological footprint per capita of many countries and is based on a similar map on Wikipedia. […]

2022 was a great year for Python. The new Python 3.11 is 10 to 60 percent faster than 3.10, thanks to the efforts of the ongoing Faster CPython project. Python continues to be popular and has spent the year as the number one programming language on the TIOBE index. At the same time, Python has become easier to run in your browser. Python’s WebAssembly port, Pyodide, has matured, and the PyScript framework has showcased some of its possibilities. Over the […]

The standard Python interpreter lets you run scripts from files or interactively execute code on the fly in a so-called read-evaluate-print loop (REPL). While this is a powerful tool for exploring the language and discovering its libraries through instant feedback on your code inputs, the default REPL shipped with Python has several limitations. Luckily, alternatives like bpython offer a much more programmer-friendly and convenient experience. You can use bpython to experiment with your code or quickly test an idea without […]

If you want to do natural language processing (NLP) in Python, then look no further than spaCy, a free and open-source library with a lot of built-in capabilities. It’s becoming increasingly popular for processing and analyzing data in the field of NLP. Unstructured text is produced by companies, governments, and the general population at an incredible scale. It’s often important to automate the processing and analysis of text that would be impossible for humans to process. To automate the processing […]

Describe any image, then let a computer create it for you. What sounded futuristic only a few years ago has become reality with advances in neural networks and latent diffusion models (LDM). DALL·E by OpenAI has made a splash through the amazing generative art and realistic images that people create with it. OpenAI now allows access to DALL·E through their API, which means that you can incorporate its functionality into your Python applications. You’ll need some experience with Python, JSON, […]