If our application uses recursion, we may call the same function with the same values many times. When that function is side-effect free, we can save a lot of time by caching the result. And even better, in Python we can do that without much effort.
When we work with dictionaries that contains lists, we need to make sure that the list exists before we can add items. Or when we use a dictionary for counters, we must make sure that we have a value before we can increment it. While this can be done by hand, there is a much more elegant way in Python.
I had to do a lot of work with lists and dictionaries to solve the puzzles for Advent of Code. Here is my little cheat sheet for these two basic data structures from which you could also benefit.
Internally Python uses classes and therefore types everywhere. However, when we declare our methods, we omit the types and end up with limited functionality for our code editors. In this post we look at type hints and how they can improve our experience to write code.
You may run into code examples where the parameters are prefixed with a star or a double star. This little feature of Python comes in handy when we need a bit more flexibility for our methods. Let us explore how that works.
In last week's post we overwrote a method in the SSL module to use Feedparser with self-signed certificates. Today we take a closer look at the so called "monkey patching" and how it works under the hood.
Feedparser is a great Python library to read RSS and ATOM feeds that I covered in Python Friday #102. When I tried to read a local RSS feed with Feedparser, I ran into a problem with my self-signed SSL certificate. Let us see how we can tell Feedparser that our certificate is trustworthy.
Time flies, and with it come new versions of Python and older ones reach the end of their lifespan. Let us use this opportunity to check if we use a Python version that is still supported.
Python is usually a straightforward language without surprises. However, when you use the round() function you may run into some strange behaviour. Let us have a look at the specialities of round() and what is going on.
A few weeks back we were running a data preparation script that took a long time to complete. The main part of the work should not take that much time, but somehow that script was sloooow. I expected that the print() statement for each record would have an impact on performance, but I had no indication of the magnitude. Is it significant? Or is it neglectable? Let us find out how big the impact can be.