Initial data analysis (IDA) has different goals than your final, production data analysis: With IDA you need to examine the initial data and intermediate results, check your assumptions, and try different approaches. Exploratory data analysis has similar requirements. Once you’re happy with your approach, and you’re ready to run the analysis in an automated manner, you care a lot more about speed and resource usage. These different goals often benefit from different implementation strategies and tools—unless you have a sufficiently […]

Python 3.12 will be released in October 2023. Even though October is still months away, you can already preview some of the upcoming features, including how Python 3.12 will offer even more readable and actionable error messages. In this tutorial, you’ll: Experience the improved communication in various error situations Learn about the background and limitations of these changes Peek into the CPython source code of the pull requests that made these error messages sparkle There are many other improvements and […]

Python’s del statement will allow you to remove names and references from different namespaces. It’ll also allow you to delete unneeded items from your lists and keys from your dictionaries. If you want to learn how to use del in your Python code, then this tutorial is for you. The del statement empowers you to better manage memory resources in your code, making your programs more efficient. To get the most out of this tutorial, you should be familiar with […]

When building Docker images, caching lets you speed up rebuilding images. But this has a downside: it can keep you from installing security updates from your base Linux distribution. If you cache the image layer that includes the security update… you’re not getting new security updates! There are a number of ways you can try to balance caching with getting security updates, with different tradeoffs. In this article we’ll cover: Caching by default, with recurring rebuild and redeploys. Deliberately breaking […]