How to Send an Email with boto and SES

Introduction Pretty much every user-based app and website needs to send an email to the user at some point, so eventually you’ll have to deal with the joyous world of programmatic emailing. There are quite a few services popping up to help you with this, but with every app having its own unique requirements, few of these services adequately get the job done. So having faced the problem a few times (and in a few languages), I decided to write […]

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The Best Machine Learning Libraries in Python

Introduction There is no doubt that neural networks, and machine learning in general, has been one of the hottest topics in tech the past few years or so. It’s easy to see why with all of the really interesting use-cases they solve, like voice recognition, image recognition, or even music composition. So, for this article I decided to compile a list of some of the best Python machine learning libraries and posted them below. In my opinion, Python is one […]

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Why Beginners Should Learn Python

From some of my other posts you’ve probably noticed that I’m a big fan of Node.js. While this is true, and has been my go-to language for a while now, I don’t always recommend it to everyone. Just starting out in programming and computer science can be a bit daunting. Which language should you pick? Which IDE should you use? And more importantly, why? In my opinion, the most important thing you should do when programming is choose the right […]

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Python async/await Tutorial

Asynchronous programming has been gaining a lot of traction in the past few years, and for good reason. Although it can be more difficult than the traditional linear style, it is also much more efficient. For example, instead of waiting for an HTTP request to finish before continuing execution, with Python async coroutines you can submit the request and do other work that’s waiting in a queue while waiting for the HTTP request to finish. It might take a bit […]

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Install Python on Mac OSX

As with just about any open source software package, there are quite a few ways to install Python on Mac OSX. I figured it would be helpful to detail a few of the easiest ways to install Python, including the following: These are the most commons you’ll encounter, and each method has its own purpose, all of which I’ll detail in the sections below. Instructions for installing Python 2 and 3 are different in most cases (but not by much), […]

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Python: Check if a File or Directory Exists

There are quite a few ways to solve a problem in programming, and this holds true especially in Python. Many times you’ll find that multiple built-in or standard modules serve essentially the same purpose, but with slightly varying functionality. Checking if a file or directory exists using Python is definitely one of those cases. Here are a few ways to check for existing files/directories and their nuances. Throughout these examples we’ll assume our current working directory has these files and […]

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The Python Property Decorator

It is often considered best practice to create getters and setters for a class’s public properties. Many languages allow you to implement this in different ways, either by using a function (like person.getName()), or by using a language-specific get or set construct. In Python, it is done using @property. In this article I’ll be describing they Python property decorator, which you may have seen being used with the @decorator syntax: class Person(object): def __init__(self, first_name, last_name): self.first_name = first_name self.last_name […]

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How to Send Emails with Gmail using Python

There are quite a few ways to send email with Python, whether it be through a 3rd party library like with boto and SES, or through an email protocol like SMTP. While the subject of using Python to send emails may seem like it’s been done to death, there are just so many different ways to do it and so many issues that can come up. I thought it would be helpful to write up a tutorial on how to […]

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Reading and Writing JSON to a File in Python

Introduction In this article, we’ll be parsing, reading and writing JSON data to a file in Python. Over the last 5-10 years, the JSON format has been one of, if not the most, popular ways to serialize data. Especially in the web development world, you’ll likely encounter JSON through one of the many REST APIs, application configuration, or even simple data storage. Given its prevalence and impact on programming, at some point in your development you’ll likely want to learn […]

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Python’s @classmethod and @staticmethod Explained

Python is a unique language in that it is fairly easy to learn, given its straight-forward syntax, yet still extremely powerful. There are a lot more features under the hood than you might realize. While I could be referring to quite a few different things with this statement, in this case I’m talking about the decorators @classmethod and @staticmethod. For many of your projects, you probably didn’t need or encounter these features, but you may find that they come in […]

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