Python Weekly 223

Articles, Tutorials and Talks

Episode #39: Getting your first dev job as a Python developer (part 1)
How often do you meet people who are looking to get into the software development space? Do they ask you for advice? Maybe they want to know your story of how you got started and landed that first big job. Maybe they want to know what they should be doing right now. This episode of Talk Python To Me is the first in a two part series that attempts to bring a wide spectrum of thoughts on this discussion.

Why Python 3 exists
Or, the whole unicode/str/bytes thing was done for a reason.

The Dilemma of giving Christmas Gifts
This post gives a game theoretic explanation as to why we exchange gifts. On twitter @alexip tweeted "'Let's agree not to give each other presents for Christmas' is just another case of the prisoner's dilemma #gametheory". This post builds on that and investigates the premise fully in an evolutionary context investigating different values of how good it feels to give and receive a gift.

Build optimization models and turn them into full featured applications with Gurobi and Anaconda
In this talk, we will cover: why choose Gurobi as your solver, why choose Python as your programming language, why choose Anaconda as your analytics platform, how Gurobi and Python can be used together to build models and applications, and an overview of useful Python resources including: Spyder and Jupyter for development, Pandas to help you manage data and Bokeh to help you visualize your results
    
Using gopy to connect to PostgreSQL from Python without psycopg2
gopy allows you to write code in Go and then dump it to a C library that can be used in Python 2.x.

Podcast.__init__ Episode 36 - Eric Holscher on Documentation
The first place we all go for learning about new libraries is the documentation. Lack of effective documentation can limit the adoption of an otherwise excellent project. In this episode we spoke with Eric Holscher, co-creator of Read The Docs, about why documentation is important and how we can all work to make it better.

Bottle Security Checklist
A security checklist, covering the basics, that can be used as a reference when developing Bottle-based applications.

Announcing sophy: fast Python bindings for Sophia Database

Sophia is a powerful key/value database with loads of features packed into a simple C API. In order to use this database in some upcoming projects I've got planned, I decided to write some Python bindings and the result is sophy. In this post, I'll describe the features of Sophia database, and then show example code using sophy, the Python wrapper.

How To Deadlock Your Python With getaddrinfo() 

Visualizing NBA Player Statistics

My Christmas Gift 

Creating NBA Shot Charts


Books

Python GUI Programming Cookbook

Python GUI Programming Cookbook follows a task-based approach to help you create beautiful and very effective GUIs with the least amount of code necessary. This book uses the simplest programming style, using the fewest lines of code to create a GUI in Python, and then advances to using object-oriented programming in later chapters. If you are new to object-oriented programming (OOP), this book will teach you how to take advantage of the OOP coding style in the context of creating GUIs written in Python. Throughout the book, you will develop an entire GUI application, building recipe upon recipe, connecting the GUI to a database. In the later chapters, you will explore additional Python GUI frameworks, using best practices. You will also learn how to use threading to ensure your GUI doesn't go unresponsive.

Python Anti-Patterns
The Little Book of Python Anti-Patterns and Worst Practice.


Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Lektor

A flexible and powerful static content management system for building complex and beautiful websites out of flat files -- for people who do not want to make a compromise between a CMS and a static blog engine. 

ispy
ispy is a python tool for monitoring the output of terminals and processes.

joblib
Python function as pipeline jobs. In particular, joblib offers: transparent disk-caching of the output values and lazy re-evaluation (memoize pattern), easy simple parallel computing, logging and tracing of the execution.

Panda3D
Panda3D is a game engine, a framework for 3D rendering and game development for Python and C++ programs. 

MusicSAUR
Music synchronization using browsers and a Python server - great for LAN systems!

TwitterPiBot
A Python based bot for Raspberry Pi that grabs tweets with a specific hashtag and reads them out loud.

pyrobuf
A Cython alternative to Google's Python Protobuf library.

tqdm
A fast, extensible progress bar for Python.

Remix
Echo Nest Remix is the Internet Synthesizer. Make amazing things from music, automatically. Turn any music or video into Python, Flash, or Javascript code.