Here is an idea for a completely free¹ speed improvement for your code — upgrade your Python version! I started this series of articles using Python 3.8, but today we already have version 3.11. Python 3.11 is the first version of Python that brings pretty significant speed improvements thanks to…

One of the most well-received features introduced in Python 3.6 were the f-strings. Unlike the walrus operator (introduced in Python 3.8), f-strings quickly became popular — it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t love them! Officially named literal string interpolation, f-strings are much more readable and faster to write. …

How do we check if something is None? With the beauty of the Python language — the code that you would write is literally the same as the above question: if something is None: It reminds me of this joke: - How do you turn pseudocode into Python? - You add…

Membership testing means checking if a collection of items (a list, a set, a dictionary, etc.) contains a specific item. For example, checking if a list of even numbers contains number 42. It’s a quite common operation, so let’s see how to do it properly. How can we check if…

How do you check if something is True in Python? There are three ways: One “bad” way: if variable == True: Another “bad” way: if variable is True: And the good way, recommended even in the Programming Recommendations of PEP8: if variable: The “bad” ways are not only frowned upon…

A quick tip: when you write an important command in shell, put a comment next to it so you can easily find it later or remember what it does: pytest -m slow --durations=10 # Run slow tests, return the slowest Why?

Some time ago, I was working on a simple tool to export data from our internal system to Excel files and allow users to import Excel files back. Sometimes the only way to convince seasoned Excel users to use your system is to give them a tool that facilitates the…

Using the latest version of Python is always a good idea. First of all - you get the new features like the f-strings (Python 3.6), ordered dictionaries (officially guaranteed from Python 3.7, but already present in Python 3.6), or the union operator (Python 3.9). But even if you don't use…

Apart from the list comprehension method, in Python, we also have dictionary comprehension — a little less known but very useful feature. It’s a perfect tool for creating a dictionary from an iterable. Let’s see how we can use it and if it’s faster than other methods. The simplest way…