February 18, 2016 by
Mike Reportlab is really nice tool for creating PDFs in Python. A little known fact is that they now support adding charts or graphs to your PDF. Previously if you wanted that functionality, you would have to do all the drawing code yourself. Unfortunately, the Reportlab guide doesn't really explain how to use their charts, what […]
February 17, 2016 by
Mike There is a little known tool that I wanted to talk about today. It is called wraps and it's a part of the functools module. You can use wraps as a decorator to fix docstrings and names of decorated functions. Why does this matter? This sounds like a weird edge case at first, but if […]
February 15, 2016 by
Mike This week we welcome Mike Bayer (@zzzeek) as our PyDev of the Week. Mike is the creator of the popular SQLAlchemy project. He has a fun Python blog and contributes to many Python projects. I've seen Mike present tutorials on SQLAlchemy at PyCon and he regularly does talks there as well (here's an example from […]
February 11, 2016 by
Mike Python comes with a fun module called functools. One of its classes is the partial class. You can use it create a new function with partial application of the arguments and keywords that you pass to it. You can use partial to "freeze" a portion of your function's arguments and/or keywords which results in a […]
This week we welcome Chris Withers as our PyDev of the Week! Chris has been using Python for quite a while. I think the first packages I used of his were the excellent xlrd and xlwt packages, used for reading and writing Excel files. You can get an idea of his contributions to Python on […]
Earlier this week, I came across another fun package called datefinder. The idea behind this package is that it can take any string with dates in it and transform them into a list of Python datetime objects. I would have loved this package at my old job where I did a lot of text file […]
