Newsletter, 11/15/2022

Hello from CodeSolid,

I hope you’re having another awesome week. It’s Tuesday (and it’s not election day), so it’s time to send you the latest goodies.

New On CodeSolid

Python Configuration Files
Until I see the web statistics, it’s always a bit of a mystery to me which articles my readers will love, but I know the ones that I like best are the ones like this where I walk away having learned something.  As usual, find all the code you’ll need to make a decision on which configuration format to use, along with an opinion or two along the way.

How to Find Duplicates in a List in Python
This tutorial with code goes into several techniques for removing duplicate entries from a list, including those that preserve order and those that don’t.  It also discusses how to remove duplicates on custom objects.

Cool Stuff Around The Web

Python for Democracy:  PacHunter
If you happen to be a closet politics junkie like me, you may find this one to be pretty cool.  PacHunter is a tool that analyzed Political Action Committee Contributions to candidates.  The demo and initial use case were to analyze PAC contributions to election deniers.

True Python Multi-Threading On the Horizon?
This discussion of the goals for Python 3.12 discusses the future of true multi-threading in Python in light of the work being done on a Multi-Interpreter GIL (Pep 684).

Develop a CRUD Web UI Quickly with Streamlit
This tutorial on Streamlit shows how to use this Python Utility to quickly stand up a basic Web User Interface for a Database Table.

New Tricks, New Traps, and Coming Soon

Rust Assured
As if I don’t have enough fun publishing new Python content every week, this week I launched a very new baby website about Rust.  Some friends and I are looking to improve our skills in this area, and for me, “improving my skills” and “writing about something” are pretty much synonymous.

Traps Department:  Where Monday Went

I’ll never get Monday morning back, but here’s a note on what I tried.  Figuring, “Hey, my readers are Python developers, right?  They don’t want to hear about Terraform”, I tried to make some headway on the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) for Python.  Once in a while, you go down a rabbit hole, and instead of an article, you find your experience can serve as a warning for others.  Such is the case with the AWS CDK for Python.  There’s no rabbit down that rabbit hole, folks.  Scorpions and snakes only.  The moral?  Use Terraform.  Or if you really need a Python wrapper around CloudFormation, try Troposphere.

Coming Soon:
I am working on an article on using large datasets in Python, including some alternatives to Pandas for this.  Two new writers should be coming along shortly as well, including one who’ll be publishing on using Python for Chemistry.