You’ve likely interacted with large language models (LLMs), like the ones behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and experienced their remarkable ability to answer questions, summarize documents, write code, and much more. While LLMs are remarkable by themselves, with a little programming knowledge, you can leverage libraries like LangChain to create your own LLM-powered chatbots that can do just about anything. In an enterprise setting, one of the most popular ways to create an LLM-powered chatbot is through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). When you […]

Python has something called wildcard imports, which look like from module import *. This type of import allows you to quickly get all the objects from a module into your namespace. However, using this import on a package can be confusing because it’s not clear what you want to import: subpackages, modules, objects? Python has the __all__ variable to work around this issue. The __all__ variable is a list of strings where each string represents the name of a variable, […]

When it comes to fighting climate change, I strongly believe that getting involved in politics is one of the most useful things you can do. But given how energy-intensive software is these days, writing more efficient software also seems worth doing, especially if your software is used at scale. However, whenever efficiency is brought up, Jevons Paradox rears its head. Writing in the 19th century, Jevons pointed out that increased efficiency in the use of coal didn’t decrease the amount […]

Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Making HTTP Requests With Python The Requests library is the de facto standard for making HTTP requests in Python. It abstracts the complexities of making requests behind a beautiful, simple API so that you can focus on interacting with services and consuming data in your application. Throughout this tutorial, you’ll see some of the […]