When you’re coding, there’s always a font involved in displaying the text on the screen. Yet, the font that you use is an often-overlooked piece in your programming tool kit. Many operating systems and code editors come with their default monospace fonts that you may end up using. But there are a bunch of technicalities and features to take into consideration when choosing the best font for your daily programming. That’s why it’s worth investigating the requirements that a programming […]

Before you can process your data with Pandas, you need to load it (from disk or remote storage). There are plenty of data formats supported by Pandas, from CSV, to JSON, to Parquet, and many others as well. Which should you use? You don’t want loading the data to be slow, or use lots of memory: that’s pure overhead. Ideally you’d want a file format that’s fast, efficient, small, and broadly supported. You also want to make sure the loaded […]

In Python, a callable is any object that you can call using a pair of parentheses and, optionally, a series of arguments. Functions, classes, and methods are all common examples of callables in Python. Besides these, you can also create custom classes that produce callable instances. To do this, you can add the .__call__() special method to your class. Instances of a class with a .__call__() method behave like functions, providing a flexible and handy way to add functionality to […]

Traditionally, if you wanted to handle HTTP requests and serve static content from files, then you had to set up a full-fledged web server like Apache or NGINX, which could be a tedious process. Building a dynamic web application requires installing a web framework, such as Django, Flask, or FastAPI, which adds yet another complexity layer. Fortunately, you can take advantage of a basic HTTP server built into Python to avoid all this hassle. Python’s HTTP server can come in […]