We write a program to solve a problem or make a tool that we can repeatedly solve a similar problem. For the latter, it is inevitable that we come back to revisit the program we wrote, or someone else is reusing the program we write. There is also a chance that we will encounter data that we didn’t foresee at the time we wrote our program. After all, we still want our program to work. There are some techniques and […]

You’ve probably heard of Kaggle data science competitions, but did you know that Kaggle has many other features that can help you with your next machine learning project? For people looking for datasets for their next machine learning project, Kaggle allows you to access public datasets by others and share your own datasets. For those looking to build and train their own machine learning models, Kaggle also offers an in-browser notebook environment and some free GPU hours. You can also […]

There are different ways of debugging code in Python, one of which is to introduce breakpoints into the code at points where one would like to invoke a Python debugger. The statements used to enter a debugging session at different call sites depend on the version of the Python interpreter that one is working with, as we shall see in this tutorial.  In this tutorial, you will discover various ways of setting breakpoints in different versions of Python.  After completing […]

Static analyzers are tools that help you check your code without really running your code. The most basic form of static analyzers is the syntax highlighters in your favorite editors. If you need to compile your code (say, in C++), your compiler, such as LLVM, may also provide some static analyzer functions to warn you about potential issues (e.g., mistaken assignment “=” for equality “==” in C++). In Python, we have some tools to identify potential errors or point out […]

Profiling is a technique to figure out how time is spent in a program. With these statistics, we can find the “hot spot” of a program and think about ways of improvement. Sometimes, a hot spot in an unexpected location may hint at a bug in the program as well. In this tutorial, we will see how we can use the profiling facility in Python. Specifically, you will see: How we can compare small code fragments using the timeit module […]

Logging is a way to store information about your script and track events that occur. When writing any complex script in Python, logging is essential for debugging software as you develop it. Without logging, finding the source of a problem in your code may be extremely time consuming. After completing this tutorial, you will know: Why we would like to use the logging module How to use the logging module How to customize the logging mechanism Kick-start your project with […]

Python is a dynamic scripting language. Not only does it have a dynamic type system where a variable can be assigned to one type first and changed later, but its object model is also dynamic. This allows us to modify its behavior at run time. A consequence of this is the possibility of monkey patching. This is an idea that we can modify the base layer of a program without modifying the higher-level code. Imagine you can use the print() […]

Python is an interpreting language. It means there is an interpreter to run our program, rather than compiling the code and running natively. In Python, a REPL (read-eval-print loop) can run commands line by line. Together with some inspection tools provided by Python, it helps to develop codes. In the following, you will see how to make use of the Python interpreter to inspect an object and develop a program. After finishing this tutorial, you will learn: How to work […]