While many people went hunting for Easter eggs, the Python community stayed active through March 2024. The free-threaded Python project reached a new milestone, and you can now experiment with disabling the GIL in your interpreter. The Python Software Foundation does a great job supporting the language with limited resources. They’ve now announced a new position that will support users of PyPI. NumPy is an old workhorse in the data science space. The library is getting a big facelift, and […]

A straightforward way to distribute desktop and command-line applications written in Python is to publish them on the Python Package Index (PyPI), which hosts hundreds of thousands of third-party packages. Many of these packages include runnable scripts, but using them requires decent familiarity with the Python ecosystem. With pipx, you can safely install and execute such applications without affecting your global Python interpreter. To help you get to grips with pipx, you can download the supplemental materials, which include a […]

There’s an abundance of third-party tools and libraries for manipulating and analyzing audio WAV files in Python. At the same time, the language ships with the little-known wave module in its standard library, offering a quick and straightforward way to read and write such files. Knowing Python’s wave module can help you dip your toes into digital audio processing. If topics like audio analysis, sound editing, or music synthesis get you excited, then you’re in for a treat, as you’re […]

If your NumPy-based code is too slow, you can sometimes use Numba to speed it up. Numba is a compiled language that uses the same syntax as Python, and it compiles at runtime, so it’s very easy to write. And because it re-implements a large part of the NumPy APIs, it can also easily be used with existing NumPy-based code. However, Numba’s NumPy support can be a trap: it can lead you to missing huge optimization opportunities by sticking to […]

In this tutorial, you’ll use Python’s turtle module to build a Space Invaders clone. The game Space Invaders doesn’t need any introduction. The original game was released in 1978 and is one of the most recognized video games of all time. It undeniably defined its own video game genre. In this tutorial, you’ll create a basic clone of this game. The turtle module you’ll use to build the game is part of Python’s standard library, and it enables you to […]