There are many projects in Python that we can use to create an API. After exploring a few options, I decided to go with FastAPI and explore it over the next few weeks. FastAPI is not only fast when it comes to serving requests, but also when it comes to writing code for it. Let …
The Garbage Collector (GC) in Python frees the memory from no longer needed objects. This usually works without any problem in the background and prevents us from memory leaks. However, for certain tasks we may pay a performance penalty that we can prevent by tuning the GC. Let us explore the options we have. This …
Last week we worked with the main methods of the re module. However, when we need to be specific about the text parts we search, we miss a lot of the flexibility we can get from regular expressions. In this post we look at metacharacters and how they make regular expressions so powerful. This post …
I waited a long time to explore regular expressions, then they tend to get complicated in no time. But for some problems there is simply no way around. Let us explore the basics and how we can use them in our Python code. This post is part of my journey to learn Python. You find …
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. This post is part of my journey to learn …
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 …
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. This post is part of my journey to learn Python. You find the code for this post …
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. This post is part of my journey to learn …
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. This post is part of my journey to learn Python. You find the …
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. This post is part of my journey to learn Python. You find the code for this post in …