Whether you’re a data scientist crunching big data in a distributed cluster, a back-end engineer building scalable microservices, or a front-end developer consuming web APIs, you should understand data serialization. In this comprehensive guide, you’ll move beyond XML and JSON to explore several data formats that you can use to serialize data in Python. You’ll explore them based on their use cases, learning about their distinct categories. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a deep understanding of the […]

Polars is a dataframe-based library that can be faster, more memory efficient, and often simpler to use than Pandas. It’s also much newer, and correspondingly less popular. In November 2023: Polars had ~2.6 million downloads from PyPI. Pandas had ~140 million downloads! Because of Pandas’ popularity and decade and a half of availability, there are many third-party libraries with built-in support for Pandas, and others that specifically extend Pandas. Many plotting and visualization libraries will accept Pandas dataframes as an […]

Python has a few important naming conventions that are based on using either a single or double underscore character (_). These conventions allow you to differentiate between public and non-public names in APIs, write safe classes for subclassing purposes, avoid name clashes, and more. Following and respecting these conventions allows you to write code that looks Pythonic and consistent in the eyes of other Python developers. This skill is especially useful when you’re writing code that’s intended for other developers […]

Python’s Rich package is a tool kit that helps you generate beautifully formatted and highlighted text in the console. More broadly, it allows you to build an attractive text-based user interface (TUI). Why would you choose a TUI over a graphical user interface, or GUI? Sometimes a text display feels more appropriate. Why use a full-blown GUI for a simple application, when an elegant text interface will do? It can be refreshing to work with plain text. Text works in […]

When you’re doing large scale data processing with Python, threads are a good way to achieve parallelism. This is especially true if you’re doing numeric processing, where the global interpreter lock (GIL) is typically not an issue. And if you’re using threading, thread pools are a good way to make sure you don’t use too many resources. But how many threads should your thread pool have? And do you need just one thread pool, or more than one? In this […]

Wouldn’t it be cool to build a Python game that only requires initial user input and then seems to take on a mind of its own, creating mesmerizing patterns along the way? You can do exactly that with Conway’s Game of Life, which is about the evolution of cells in a life grid. Implementing the Game of Life algorithm is a good exercise with many interesting challenges that you’ll have to figure out. Specifically, you’ll need to build the life […]

One of Django’s most popular features is the admin interface. For developers, it provides an out-of-the-box tool kit to work with your project’s data models. And it gives non-technical administrators an intuitive user interface (UI) for interacting with the database and creating website content. However, the Django admin doesn’t provide a way to format text-based content. Using Markdown with Django is a great solution. Markdown is a plain text formatting language that can automatically convert to HTML for publishing on […]