The standard shell is ok, but there are four alternatives that offer missing features. — One of the core advantages of Python compared to many other languages is that it comes with an interactive Shell. This is especially useful for explorative tasks…

Five libraries that make your console beautiful — A lot of people still write their command-line applications with Argparse or even Optparse plus input(). Creating outputs is often done directly with print and formatting strings — which gets really hairy when you want to print tables or have some color/emphasis. There are four libraries that allow you to…

Let’s see how the Python Package Index evolved in 2022 — PyPI, the python package index, is the default package repository for Python. It’s completely open and free to use for anybody. Anybody can contribute packages. PyPI is also the default package index for Python: When you run pip install flake8 the package manager will typically look on PyPI for flake8. …

There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it. — An Enum is a collection of static values, typically strings or integers. They are used pretty often — or at least they should be. At Cashlink, we typically use them to track steps for longer processes. Enums are a way to group constants. Constants are useful to prevent typos as…

The technologies and ideas behind the buzzword — Software needs hardware to run on. For a long time, this meant that you have to buy hardware, ensure that the network connection keeps working, worry about power outages and device errors, and make sure the temperature is fine. You need to buy new machines when you get more customers…

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the world hard in 2020 and 2021. As if that wasn’t enough, we’ve experienced several products not being available. For me, that was the first time in my life. It feels weird — and in some cases frightening. Let’s explore what happened and why. A Timeline of Shortages We had…

Improve your software engineering skills — Every software developer with a little bit of experience knows that keeping things simple and stupid (KISS) makes sense. Once you have learned to use classes and functions, you don’t want to repeat yourself — keep things DRY. The goal of all of those principles is to make software easy…

We are caught in sub-optimal situations — In Machine Learning, you describe a problem and you try to find a model which solves that problem well. It’s very common that the model is stuck in a locally optimal solution — meaning tiny changes make the model worse… but big changes make it better. It’s pretty common to…