Yasoob Khalid

Debugging ETW Event Drops in High-Throughput Applications

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 13:44:17 -0800

I was working on a production application recently where we rely heavily on ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) to emit high-frequency events. We are talking about millions of events every few seconds. We started noticing gaps in our telemetry—we were running into event drops. This was a critical issue. If you are losing events, you are flying blind. I had to figure out which provider was producing the most events and where the bottleneck was.

Converting Sourcemaps to Original JavaScript/TypeScript Sourcecode

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 05:54:24 -0700

Introduction Hi everyone! This is going to be a short and quick tutorial on how to download sourcemap files and convert them into the original JavaScript source code. Here’s an example of minified code from a Next.js website: And here is the same code after the browser has done its magic and reconstructed the original code using sourcemaps: Take a look at the bottom toolbar — it shows whether the displayed code is a bundled file or the original source file.

Salam - Privacy Policy

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:50:04 -0400

Effective Date: March 9, 2025 Salam (“we”, “our”, or “the app”) values your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal information. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and share information when you use the Salam app. By using the app, you agree to the collection and use of information as described in this policy. 1. Data Collection No Personal Data Collected: Salam does not collect, store, or share any personal information about you.

Salam - Support Page

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:50:04 -0400

Welcome to the Salam app support page! Below you’ll find detailed information about how to get the most out of the Salam app and troubleshoot any issues you may encounter. If you need further assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team. Table of Contents Getting Started Prayer Times Widgets Qibla Direction Finder Quran Reading Audio Recitations Asma-ul-Husna Notifications Troubleshooting Contact Support Getting Started How to Set Up Salam Download the app from the App Store.

Breaking Kakasoft USB Copy Protection

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 15:37:31 -0700

I recently got my hands on a USB drive with Kakasoft USB Copy Protection (DRM protection). This software promises to let you share data without the fear of it being copied by the end user. However, the pseudo-hacker in me couldn’t resist the challenge. After all, “If it can be read, it can be copied.” In this article, I’ll walk you through the entire process I used to crack this protection, sharing my thought process and detailed steps along the way.

Running Go code from Elixir Using Web Assembly

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 00:39:55 -0800

I was working on an Elixir project recently and one particular open source package that I wanted to make use of was written in Go. I searched for different ways to interface with Go code from Elixir. I know that it is fairly trivial to interface Rust code from Elixir using a NIF but there isn’t anything similar for Go that I came across. Most of my research led me towards using Ports and I was about to give in before realizing that WASI (WebAssembly System Interface) is also an option.

How to Use Apple Vision Framework via PyObjC for Text Recognition

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 20:03:31 -0700

Introduction This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for a long time. Sometime earlier this year I saw a job posting where someone wanted to use Apple’s vision framework to do text recognition. I wasn’t interested in the job but I was curious about the Vision framework as I had never used it before. In this article, I will take you through how I used PyObjC to interface with the Apple Vision Framework and create a script to detect text in images.

How to Efficiently Reorder or Rerank Items in Database

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 23:32:12 +0500

I was once thinking about Trello and Jira and wondered how they implemented the sorting functionality in their drag & drop interface. You can have a million items/cards and both of these platforms will allow you to change the order in a simple drag and drop manner and efficiently update their position in the database. How could I implement such a system? It was hard to do research on this topic because most queries returned results from blogs that showed how to implement a drag and drop component using React DnD and similar libraries but did not show how to persist the new order in a database.

Project Write-up: Display Spotify lyrics on external display

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 01:43:58 +0500

Hi guys! 👋 It has been a while since I last posted anything. I have been busy but I am back with a fun article. I came across a job posting on Upwork where someone was looking for a software that plays the lyrics of a Spotify song on dual screens. One screen will display the English lyrics and the other one will display Hungarian lyrics. I was really intrigued so I decided to give it a go.

Setting Up Custom Root Domain using Webflow and Cloudflare

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 03:08:35 +0500

Hi everyone! 👋 I tried Webflow for the first time a few days ago and fell in love with it. I have been programming for a good number of years now and I am fairly comfortable with HTML and CSS but I can’t imagine building complex interactions without Webflow anymore. The grass is surprisingly mostly green on the other side 😆 Problem But you aren’t here to listen to my praise for Webflow.

Extracting WhatsApp messages from an iOS backup

Sun, 24 Apr 2022 06:20:49 +0500

Hi everyone! 👋 I was recently exploring how to get a local backup of WhatsApp messages from my iPhone. I switched from Android to iOS in the past and lost all of my WhatsApp messages. I wanted to make sure that if I switched again from iOS to Android I don’t lose any messages. I don’t really care if I can import the messages in WhatsApp. I just don’t want to lose all of the important information I have in my chats.

Web Automation With Selenium And Python

Sat, 23 Apr 2022 05:05:36 +0500

Hi everyone! 👋 I recently moved to Redmond, WA, and tried to get into some sports that could keep me active and moving. After looking around for a bit I realized that half the people here play badminton so it was an easy decision for me to sign up for a local badminton academy. However, after signing up I realized that most of the courts were already booked for prime-time (between 4-8 pm).

How to get a job in big-tech (Internships/New grads)?

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 17:45:07 -0700

Hi all! 👋 If you have been following me for a while then you might be aware that I work at Microsoft. Every so often I get asked by people about how to get a job in big tech. Some people have always dreamed about working for FAANG. Microsoft isn’t in FAANG but it comes as close as you can get. I will write down some of the common answers I have given to people over the last few months.

How to web scrape on Schedule using Github Actions?

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 13:24:54 +0500

Hi everyone! 👋 It’s been a long time since I last posted on this blog. I was busy graduating from college and moving places and that didn’t leave enough time for fun new projects. I am still in the middle of it all but recently did a project that gave me a tutorial idea to write about. I was asked to create a web scraper that would scrape a certain website, filter the data and then send an email with that data.

Understanding and Generating a UPC-A barcode using Python

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 18:49:08 -0400

Hi everyone! 👋 I have always been fascinated by barcodes and QR codes. I have known for a long time about how they work in theory but I never did enough research on it. It seemed like I would learn a lot from diving deeper and implementing a barcode generator from scratch. There is no substitute for learning more about something by creating it from scratch so that is exactly what I did.

Setting up listmonk, an open-source newsletter & mailing list manager

Fri, 12 Mar 2021 00:00:53 -0500

Hi everyone! 👋 I have been using Mailchimp for my mailing list for a while and even though it is great, it is super expensive. I have 5000+ people in my list and that puts me in their $78 plan. I send the newsletter very rarely and don’t really earn anything from the mailing list so it was really hard for me to justify the $78. I had recently integrated Amazon SES with a project and found out that SES gives you a free 50,000 email sending quota per month.

Making a Serverless eBook Stamping & Delivery Service

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 03:25:08 -0500

Hi everyone! 👋 I recently launched the release candidate of my Practical Python Projects book. There were a couple of unique issues I was facing and I decided to write about them and share how I got around most of them. This is not an end-to-end service implementation tutorial but rather a quick walk-through. I will show you most of the important bits and pieces of code for this service. If you are pressed for time, you can go to whatever section sounds interesting and start reading from there.

How to Prerender React Apps Using Prerender

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 01:29:50 +0500

Hi everyone! 👋 I have been working on a sports analytics startup and the whole front-end is made using React. I haven’t had to work on such a big React project before this and so it brought along some unique challenges. In the past, SEO hasn’t been a big issue for the web projects I have worked on. I could always just add relevant data to the meta tags, define the navigation using semantic HTML tags and Google would show the website correctly on its result pages.

Setting up & Deploying JWT based auth using Flask & React

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 02:10:02 -0400

Hi everyone! 👋 I was working on a React project these last couple of weeks and I had to implement login functionality. I searched around and most of the solutions I found relied on Redux or some other huge dependency that I wasn’t already using in my project. I didn’t want to introduce a big dependency so decided to continue looking. In the end, I found a wonderful library by Oleg Babichev that allowed me to implement the login functionality on the front-end fairly easily.

Using Python to Post Stories on Instagram

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:24:49 -0400

Hi everyone! 👋 In my book (Practical Python Projects), I initially had a section showing the readers how to upload stories on Instagram in an automated fashion. I ended up removing the code from the last draft of the book for various reasons. During the span of a few months, the library I was using to post on Instagram was removed from GitHub. Just because this is not an officially supported feature by Instagram and the third-party libraries on GitHub come and go every couple of months, I decided not to add the code for automation in the book that is tied to any such third-party library.

How to Listen to Trunked Police Radio (Video 2020)

Sun, 30 Aug 2020 14:42:02 -0400

Hi everyone! 👋 Remember I wrote a post recently about how you can listen to your local police department using a Baofeng? As it turns out, most police and fire departments have moved to trunked radio. Trunked radio is just a fancy way of saying that these departments have gone digital. A Baofeng UV-5X3 or UV-5R radio can not decode this communication. You have two options. You will either have to buy an expensive radio from Motorolla or Kenwood that supports digital modes or you can use a $25-$35 RTL-SDR.

Alpha Version of Practical Python Projects Book Released!

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 19:52:52 -0400

Hi everyone! 👋 I have big news! The alpha version of my Practical Python Projects book is out! It took me two years and countless hours to get to this stage and I am so proud of it. You can buy it now from here. The final version of the book will be more expensive than the alpha price of $29.99. Moreover, the first 25 people to use the code ppp-yasoob-blog will get the book at an extra 15% off.

Using BaoFeng UV-5X3 HT as Police Scanner

Mon, 17 Aug 2020 01:36:31 -0400

Hi lovely people! 👋 I am a huge radio enthusiast. So much so that I recently gave (and cleared) my Technician Ham license exam. I am now just waiting for my call sign to appear in the FCC database. While that is happening, I went ahead and bought a BaoFeng UV-5X3 radio. Note: If you ever decide to buy this radio look at the BaoFeng website first. You might be able to score a cheaper deal there.

Working With Messy Data Using Pandas in Python

Sun, 16 Aug 2020 02:08:42 -0400

Hi lovely people! 👋 I am working on a project and had to wrangle some messy data using Pandas. New project means new ideas for articles and so here I am with an article about how to work with messy data using Pandas in Python. I will be covering only some of the basics that you will need to know for most of your data analysis projects. So without wasting any time let’s begin!

5 Lessons From my Microsoft Internship

Thu, 13 Aug 2020 14:03:01 -0400

Hi lovely people! 👋 A week ago my internship at Microsoft ended. I am very fortunate to have been able to intern at all this summer, let alone at Microsoft. I learned quite a lot during the summer and was fortunate enough to be a part of an amazing team. I wanted to take a moment and share some important lessons I learned. Some of these are new and some were learned at my previous internship and I learned their importance after applying them at my Microsoft internship.

Interview With Justin Duke

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 16:53:32 -0400

Hi everyone! 👋 I recently sat down with Justin Duke, an engineer at Stripe, and talked about tech, startups and time management. Along with a full-time job, Justin runs two startups (Buttondown, Spoonbill), manages two weekly newsletters, runs, and volunteers. Come learn about how he does it all! This is the trial run of a podcast idea I have had for a while. I might continue recording similar interviews in the future.

Understanding and Decoding a JPEG Image using Python

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Hi everyone! 👋 Today we are going to understand the JPEG compression algorithm. One thing a lot of people don’t know is that JPEG is not a format but rather an algorithm. The JPEG images you see are mostly in the JFIF format (JPEG File Interchange Format) that internally uses the JPEG compression algorithm. By the end of this article, you will have a much better understanding of how the JPEG algorithm compresses data and how you can write some custom Python code to decompress it.

Reverse Engineering Nike Run Club Android App Using Frida

Sun, 05 Jul 2020 17:08:46 -0400

Hi everyone! 👋 If you have been following my blog then you might have already read the article on reverse engineering an Android app by writing custom smali code. I am still very much a reverse engineering beginner so after that article, I got to learn about Frida. I was told that Frida is much faster and a lot easier for scenarios where I want to snoop on functions. Well, I am glad to report that all the suggestions were absolutely correct.

Let's Reverse Engineer an Android App!

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 00:00:00 -0400

I had always wanted to learn how to reverse engineer Android apps. There were people out there who knew how to navigate and modify the internals of an APK file and I wasn’t one of them. This had to be changed but it took a long time for that to happen. In this post, I will show you how I was able to reverse engineer an Android app, add some debug statements, and figure out how certain query parameters for API calls were being generated.

Help! My browser isn't connecting to public WiFi!

Sun, 14 Jun 2020 00:01:05 -0400

Have you ever been to a coffee shop and tried connecting to the public WiFi only to find out that your browser isn’t automatically opening up the router login page? These situations suck and happen far too often with all of us. I recently got a new Linux based machine and Firefox wasn’t successfully detecting the hotspot access page. It was telling me that there was an SSL error but even non-https websites were not getting redirected to the router login page.

Privacy Preserving Google Analytics Alternatives

Sat, 13 Jun 2020 04:11:51 -0400

Hi everyone! 👋 Lately I have been restructuring my online presence and that included running this blog using a static site generator. During this process, I decided to also look for privacy-preserving Google Analytics alternatives. When concerned with website analytics, the default solution most people reach out to is Google Analytics but there are good reasons for not using GA. This post will give you a rundown of the different alternatives I came across during my research.

9 Tips For Better Scripting Experience

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 00:17:55 -0400

During my day to day work, I have had to do a lot of scripting. This can range from running short tests in Docker containers to running super long processes in Azure Batch service. I have used Bash and Python for these purposes and learned quite a few useful techniques along the way. I am sharing them here in hopes that they might save you some time and you don’t have to learn them the “hard” way.

How to Deploy old Django project using NGINX, Docker and UWSGI

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 02:01:59 -0400

Hi everyone! 👋 I maintain an old website for a client that was originally developed in 2015. It hasn’t been updated for the last 5 years and uses Django 1.7 and some Django extensions which haven’t been updated for Django 3. I recently decided to move the website to a new server and had to repackage the Django code in a Docker container. It took me some time to get it working correctly so I hope this article can save you some time if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.

Why I Moved Away From Wordpress.com

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 00:00:04 -0400

Hi everyone! 👋 Quite a few of you got redirected to this website from my old Python Tips blog. The old blog was based on Wordpress and I recently moved everything to Hugo. I am still in the process of figuring certain things out but so far the transition has been fairly smooth. I alluded to this post a while ago and told you all that I will write down my reasoning for why I moved away from Wordpress.

Migrating from Wordpress.com to Hugo With Comments

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 03:16:17 -0400

Hi beautiful people! 👋 Recently I decided to go all-in on static site generator, Hugo, and move over my Python Tips blog from Wordpress to Hugo. I will share the exact steps I took during this migration. It was slightly more involved than I would have liked. I will not share the reasoning behind why I moved to Hugo in this post, but rather just the details of how the process went.

Docker attach vs exec & When to Use What

Thu, 04 Jun 2020 00:00:16 -0400

Hello lovely people! 👋 During my day to day work with SONiC I have to launch new Docker containers and run commands within those containers. I usually have an ENTRYPOINT or CMD defined in my Dockerfile which means that there is always a default process that starts when I run my Docker images. When I started working with Docker I would always use the attach command to connect to a running container.

Account Hacked, Send $2000 in Bitcoin

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 01:37:18 -0400

Hi everyone! 👋 Someone I know recently got an email informing them that their account had been hacked. The subject of the email had their password and the email went like this: 𝙸𝚝 𝚜𝚎𝚎𝚖𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝, xxxxxxxx, 𝚒𝚜 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚙𝚊𝚜𝚜𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚍. 𝙸 𝚛𝚎𝚚𝚞𝚒𝚛𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚙𝚕𝚎𝚝𝚎 𝚊𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚗𝚎𝚡𝚝 𝟸𝟺 𝚑𝚘𝚞𝚛𝚜, 𝚘𝚛 𝙸 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚌𝚎𝚛𝚝𝚊𝚒𝚗𝚕𝚢 𝚖𝚊𝚔𝚎 𝚜𝚞𝚛𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚕𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚎𝚖𝚋𝚊𝚛𝚛𝚊𝚜𝚜𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚕𝚒𝚏𝚎.

Software Engineering Within SpaceX

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 15:51:39 -0400

Hi everyone! 👋 I am sure quite a few of you must have seen the SpaceX launch this past Saturday. It was an amazing and historic event. Millions of people were watching it live on YouTube and elsewhere. With each passing day, we are getting closer to commercial space flights and I have to agree I am excited. In addition to fueling my excitement about space travel, this launch also made me curious about the tech which goes in these rockets.

Setting Up Passwordless SSH and Alias For Remote Login

Wed, 20 May 2020 19:29:32 -0400

Hi lovely people! 👋 Long time! If you guys are wondering what I have been up-to, don’t worry. I am doing well and currently in the process of writing a life update post. Till then enjoy this short tutorial. By the end of this tutorial you will be able to ssh into a remote machine without typing in its IP or the password in your terminal. This is extremely helpful when you are working with remote machines most of the time.

Benedict Cumberbatch Digital Portrait (Procreate)

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:59:22 -0400

Hi everyone! 👋 It’s a tough time for everyone and we are all doing what we can to stay sane. I haven’t written on the blog in a long time and now I feel like I have all the time in the world to do it. I have started focusing more on my art and just made this portrait of Benedict Cumberbatch. This piece was done in Procreate on an iPad.

Making Generative Portraits Using Processing

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 13:35:26 -0500

Hi everyone! 👋 Haven’t talked to you guys for a while. Hope things are going well on your end. Last semester I was studying abroad in Budapest but now I am back at Colgate. I had the time of my life traveling all over Europe and meeting/staying with interesting people. I will try to write an article about that soon. Till then sit tight and enjoy this article about generative art.

First Step into the World of Generative Art

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 23:07:50 +0200

Hi people! 👋 Hope everything is going well with you all. I recently started exploring graphics and processing. Processing is a wonderful software which allows you to program graphics very easily. You can get some amazing results with only a few lines of code. I have produced some basic sketches so far. I am going to link them below. Hope you like (at least some) them 😁 If you want to learn how to make cool art using processing then I would highly recommend you to watch some videos of Daniel Shiffman on YouTube.

Filtering & Closing Pull Requests on GitHub using the API

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 06:00:11 +0000

Hi everyone! 👋 In this post, I am going to show you how you can use the GitHub API to query Pull Requests, check the content of a PR and close it. The motivation for this project came from my personal website. I introduced static comments on the website using Staticman and only after a day or two, got bombarded with spam. I hadn’t enabled Akismet or any honey pot field so it was kinda expected.

Looking for an internship for Summer 2020

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 20:27:49 +0000

Update: Thank you so much! I got an amazing opportunity with Azure Cloud Networking team at Microsoft 🙂 Hi lovely people! 👋 Hope everything is going well on your end. I asked you guys last year for helping me find a kick-ass internship and you all came through. I ended up working at ASAPP over the summer and had an awesome time. I wrote an article about what I learned during my internship.

Project Greenhouse Using Arduino, Raspberry Pi & Sensors

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 01:01:01 +0200

Hi lovely people! 👋 A couple of months ago I wrote a couple of articles on how to connect different sensors and an LCD to an Arduino. However, I didn’t write one final article about how these things all fit together to form a greenhouse monitoring system. I don’t think I will be able to get to it anytime soon (lack of time for a detailed tutorial). Therefore, I decided to just write about what the final project was and what it did and most importantly, where the inspiration for it came from.

My Internship Experience at ASAPP

Mon, 16 Sep 2019 13:21:13 +0200

Hi everyone! 👋 This past summer I interned at ASAPP. I had an amazing time and learned quite a lot. I worked with Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis, Rabbit MQ, Golang, react and typescript. I was a part of the “routing team” and spent most of my time on implementing new features. This often meant writing the backend code in go and then (sometimes) writing the front-end code in typescript.

Python mind-teaser: Make the function return True

Tue, 30 Jul 2019 22:43:13 +0000

Hi everyone! 👋 I was browsing /r/python and came across this post: The challenge was easy. Provide such an input that if 1 is added to it, it is the instance of the same object but if 2 is added it is not. Solution 1: Custom class The way I personally thought to solve this challenge was this: def check(x): if x+1 is 1+x: return False if x+2 is not 2+x: return False return True class Test(int): def __add__(self, v): if v == 1: return 0 else: return v print(check(Test())) # output: True Let me explain how this works.

Staticman Comment Notifications Setup Using Mailgun

Wed, 26 Jun 2019 17:54:58 -0400

Hi people! 👋 This post is about how to set up email notifications for new comments on your blog using staticman. This way if someone posts a comment on an article can automatically get updated in case someone else makes a new comment on the same article. It took me a while to figure out how to do it properly. I will take you through each step so that you don’t have to bang your head against a wall.

Running Staticman on Hugo Blog With Nested Comments

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 17:32:59 -0400

Hi everyone! 👋 After transitioning to a static blog/website, I had one problem. My blog no longer had comments functionality. Yes, I could have used Disqus but I personally hate it. It is bloated with a lot of unwanted code. I did some search a while ago but couldn’t find anything. I did a more serious search a couple of weeks ago and stumbled upon staticman and holy moly it is the best thing ever!

Setting up dev environment for SciPy

Fri, 21 Jun 2019 21:03:25 +0000

Hi everyone! 👋 I got an email from someone pretty recently who wanted to setup a dev environment for SciPy. He had made changes to the source code of SciPy and now wanted to test if his changes were working or not. He had gotten so far without actually testing the code. In this post I will share details on how to setup a dev environment the right way. I will focus mainly on Mac OS.

Golang: Check if a key exists in map

Tue, 18 Jun 2019 18:55:05 -0400

Hi people! I am working at ASAPP and a lot of my work involves writing Golang code. This is the first time I am working with Golang full-time. I picked up a couple of tricks from my colleagues and mentors here and would like to share them with you. In this particular post, I will talk about the empty struct. There was a scenario where I wanted to check if two slices contained the same elements or not.

Speeding up Python code using multithreading

Wed, 29 May 2019 17:44:13 +0000

Hi lovely people! 👋 A lot of times we end up writing code in Python which does remote requests or reads multiple files or does processing on some data. And in a lot of those cases I have seen programmers using a simple for loop which takes forever to finish executing. For example: import requests from time import time url_list = [ "https://via.placeholder.com/400", "https://via.placeholder.com/410", "https://via.placeholder.com/420", "https://via.placeholder.com/430", "https://via.placeholder.com/440", "https://via.placeholder.com/450", "https://via.placeholder.com/460", "https://via.placeholder.com/470", "https://via.

Running Python in the Browser

Wed, 22 May 2019 17:49:45 +0000

Running Python in the web browser has been getting a lot of attention lately. Shaun Taylor-Morgan knows what he’s talking about here - he works for Anvil, a full-featured application platform for writing full-stack web apps with nothing but Python. So I invited him to give us an overview and comparison of the open-source solutions for running Python code in your web browser. In the past, if you wanted to build a web UI, your only choice was JavaScript.

Looking for a Single in New York City

Thu, 09 May 2019 00:21:58 -0400

Update: I have found a super nice place and I am all set. Thank you everyone! Hi lovely people! 👋 You guys were able to help me before when I was searching for an internship and now I need your help again. I am planning on moving to New York City from 11th May till 4th August and need a place to stay. I had a place to stay until last night.

Extracting Data from Nike Run Club & Visualizing It

Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Hi lovely people! 👋 Most people who know me in person know that I love running. I try to run at least twice a week. I properly started running in May 2017 and have been running more or less consistently since then. I have been using the Nike Run Club app to log all of my run data. When I started using it I had no idea that I was getting sucked into a walled garden and there was no official way to move my data out of the Nike ecosystem.

Creating Offline Custom Style Maps With tileserver-gl

Sat, 27 Apr 2019 14:33:31 -0400

Hi lovely people! 👋 Last year, I saw a project on Product Hunt which allowed people to generate posters from maps. The website has since closed down and the company has been acquired by Airbnb. This is what the output looked like: Now, I was interested in figuring out how they were able to render this map. My experience with maps was limited to Google Maps only so I was excited to explore the world of custom map generation.

6 Tips Before You Write Your Next Bash Cronjob

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 19:59:49 -0400

Hi lovely people! 👋 As part of a research I am doing I had to write some bash scripts which were supposed to run every couple of minutes. I made some embarrassing mistakes along the way. I will write about those mistakes in hopes that you don’t make them if and when you write your own bash scripts as cronjobs. So without wasting any time lets begin! 1. Shebang I have heard people say since forever that add a shebang at the top of your scripts.

:herb: Greenhouse Part 3: Connecting LCD With Arduino

Sun, 21 Apr 2019 01:11:12 -0400

Hi lovely people! 👋 In the last two posts, we learned how to use the temperature, light intensity, and soil moisture sensors. So far we have covered all of the sensors my greenhouse is going to have in the alpha version. I know I am missing out on the integral humidity sensor but I didn’t have that one lying around 😅. Well, 3 sensors are more than enough for our learning purposes.

:herb: Greenhouse Part 2: Measuring Temperature & Light Intensity

Sat, 20 Apr 2019 20:12:17 -0400

Hi lovely people! 👋 In the last article we talked about the soil moisture sensor. In this article, we will take a look at how to measure temperature using DS18b20 and measure light intensity using a photocell. Step 1: Wiring up the Circuit We will be using: Arduino UNO Breadboard DS18B20 Temperature Sensor Photocell (any typical one) 4.7KΩ resistor 10KΩ resistor Jumper Wires Wire up the circuit like this:

:herb: Greenhouse Part 1: Using Yl-69 Soil Sensor With Arduino

Sat, 20 Apr 2019 19:34:33 -0400

Hi lovely people! 👋 If you have read any of my other articles you might be aware that I am working with electronics right now. After learning the basics of Arduino, I decided to work on a relatively ambitious project. I decided to make a greenhouse monitoring system. I am going to write a series of posts introducing you to all of the sensors one by one and by the end of this series, we will have a fully functional, super basic, greenhouse monitoring system.

Connecting and Interfacing Raspberry Pi with Arduino

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 11:28:41 -0400

Hi lovely people! 👋 I am working on a greenhouse monitoring project and I had to connect my Arduino to the internet over WiFi. I wanted to push some sensor data to my server. I could have bought a WiFi shield for the Arduino but why spend more money when you already have a Pi with WiFi card? I ended up connecting Arduino with my Pi and pushing sensor data to my server through the Pi.

Headless Interfacing with Raspberry Pi 3 over UART using CP210x

Tue, 16 Apr 2019 12:04:57 -0400

Hi people! If you read the last article you might be aware that I am exploring raspberry pi right now. I have Pi 3B+ and I am using it to work on some remote sensors. The biggest issue I have with the Pi is that I don’t have an external monitor, mouse, and keyboard handy to use with the Pi. I wanted to have a headless interface with the Raspberry pi.

Connecting Raspberry Pi to Eduroam Wifi

Sun, 14 Apr 2019 17:34:40 -0400

Hi people! 👋 I was working with Raspberry Pi lately and was trying to connect it to eduroam. If you are not familiar with eduroam, it is a service used by most universities to provide Wifi on their campuses. It uses Enterprise WPA and Raspberry Pi does not connect to it automatically out of the box. I actually found these instructions on a different website but that website is down now.

Revolution OS

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 11:48:52 -0400

I had already seen the video about the History of Unix by Rob Pike (do watch it if this kind of stuff interests you. It is available on YouTube) so I didn’t think I would learn a lot of new stuff from this movie but oh boy was I wrong. This was an interesting deep dive into the history of the GNU project and Free & Open Source Software movement. We take free stuff for granted nowadays.

Art Projects

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 02:37:20 -0400

I spend considerable time doing arts and creative projects. I used to do it as a hobby but now I am taking drawing and digital studio classes at Colgate University. We have been making a lot of interesting projects and have been trying to push the limits of creativity. Here are some of the projects I have done so far: Processing/Digital Sketches I recently started exploring the world of generative art and this is the result of that.

About

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 19:50:04 -0400

During the last couple of years I have completed numerous projects, authored a widely read programming book, Intermediate Python, and written 150+ programming articles. My work has benefitted people at: My book and articles have been read by 5+ Million people in 189+ countries. If you are interested in learning more about how I got into programming please read this article. I am currently working on some cool stuff at Microsoft with the Azure Cloud Networking team.

New blog new me

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 12:23:27 -0400

Hi everyone! I have been thinking about starting a blog on my personal website for quite a while now. Previously I just blogged on Python Tips. Even stuff which did not relate with Python found its way to Python Tips. I think some distinction is important. I always had to do some mental struggle to justify posting some non-python content on Python Tips. Having this blog will surely mean that I will give even less time to Python Tips but it also means that I will be able to write more.

Python dis module and constant folding

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 05:40:49 +0000

Hi people! Recently, I was super confused when I found out that: >>> pow(3,89) runs slower than: >>> 3**89 I tried to think of a suitable answer but couldn’t find any. I timed the execution of both of these statements using the timeit module in Python3: $ python3 -m timeit 'pow(3,89)' 500000 loops, best of 5: 688 nsec per loop $ python3 -m timeit '3**89' 500000 loops, best of 5: 519 nsec per loop The difference is not big.

Issues with how we teach

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 05:55:26 +0000

Throughout my life, I used to ask myself, “How do people invent something?”. In my case, I was specifically concerned with Maths, Physics, and Computer Science. I would ask myself, “I know how to use these formulas but how did someone come up with these formulas?”. My teachers' responses were always the same: “Don’t worry you will understand how it works later on. For now, just learn how to use this formula”.

Research Writeup: Deanonymization and Proximity Detection Using Wi-Fi

Thu, 13 Dec 2018 05:54:12 +0000

Hi everyone! If you have been following my blog for a while you will know that I did research at Colgate University over the summers. My research was on Wi-Fi and how I can do some interesting stuff using it. The university just published its annual catalogue of all the research projects which happened over the summer. My research was done under the mentorship of Aaron Gember-Jacobson. I could not have asked for a better advisor.

Email Security & Privacy

Sat, 01 Dec 2018 20:00:55 +0000

Hi everyone! I hope all of you are doing well. Things have been super exciting on my side. Just got done with a file system checker project in C for my Operating Systems class. It was mentally draining but equally rewarding. This blog post is not about Python but rather about Emails. This week I also gave a department wide talk at Colgate University on Email security and privacy and some of the SMTP features which are available at your disposal.

Review: The History of Unix Video

Sat, 10 Nov 2018 23:41:42 +0000

Hi everyone! If you have been following my blog for a while, you will know how much I love computers. I recently watched this video about the history of Unix and decided to write a short post about it. It’s a one hour presented by Rob Pike who joined Bell labs and worked on Unix in the 70’s. I got to know about the video via Hacker News (you should definitely follow it if you don’t!

Privacy & Why it Matters

Fri, 05 Oct 2018 01:42:07 +0000

⚠️ Long post about privacy. Doesn’t relate to Python at all. Do read if you care and want to learn more about how your privacy is being violated. Last couple of weeks have totally changed my whole viewpoint on privacy. I was also a part of that bandwagon in which people say that “Why should I be worried about privacy when I don’t have anything to hide or I don’t do anything illegal?

Sending & Sniffing WLAN Beacon Frames using Scapy

Sat, 08 Sep 2018 16:48:21 +0000

Hi everyone! Over the summers I did research on Wi-Fi and part of my research involved sending and receiving different kinds of IEEE 802.11 packets. I did most of this stuff using Scapy so I thought why not create a tutorial about it? When I started my research I had to look through multiple online articles/tutorials in order to get started with Scapy. In order to save you time I am going to bring you up-to speed by running you through a short tutorial.

Practical Python Projects Book

Mon, 02 Jul 2018 22:17:48 +0000

Hi everyone! I am super proud to announce that my second book 🎉🎉"Practical Python Projects“🎉🎉 is alhamdulillah almost halfway done content-wise. This book is a direct result of a market gap which I found when I started programming a couple of years back. Most programming beginners have access to multiple resources to teach themselves the basics of Python (or any other language) but they don’t have access to those books/tutorials where they are taught to create end-to-end projects in a specific language.

A FIFA 2018 World Cup SMS bot using Twilio, Heroku and Flask

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 05:53:07 +0000

Hi everyone! I am back with yet another tutorial. Its World Cup season and every other person is rooting for his/her favorite team. I was thinking about the next blog post idea and I thought why not create a project which can help you stay updated with how the world cup is progressing? And along the way, I might be able to teach myself (and you) something new. The end product is this tutorial.

An Intro to Web Scraping With lxml and Python

Wed, 20 Jun 2018 07:46:48 +0000

Hello everyone! I hope you are doing well. In this article, I’ll teach you the basics of web scraping using lxml and Python. I also recorded this tutorial in a screencast so if you prefer to watch me do this step by step in a video please go ahead and watch it below. However, if for some reason you decide that you prefer text, just scroll a bit more and you will find the text of that same screencast.

Top 14 MOST famous Python libraries & frameworks

Sun, 03 Jun 2018 04:47:33 +0000

Hi everyone! I recently decided to step into YouTube video making. This is my first video about 14 of my most favourite and most famous Python libraries and frameworks. Please take a look and if you have ANY suggestions as to how I can improve the quality of the videos in the future please let me know in the comments below.

Python local/global scopes

Fri, 18 May 2018 20:47:14 +0000

How’s everyone? I am back with another tip/gotcha which might trip beginner programmers. This one relates to Python scopes so if you are already familiar with them then this article might not be very informative for you. If you are not very well versed in Python scopes then keep reading. Lets start with a code sample. Save the following code in a file and run it: command = "You are a LOVELY person!

Reverse Engineering Facebook API: Private Video Downloader

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 22:08:14 +0000

Welcome back! This is the third post in the reverse engineering series. The first post was reverse engineering Soundcloud API and the second one was reverse engineering Facebook API to download public videos. In this post we will take a look at downloading private videos. We will reverse engineer the API calls made by Facebook and will try to figure out how we can download videos in the HD format (when available).

Reverse Engineering Facebook: Public Video Downloader

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 13:47:07 +0000

In the last post we took a look at downloading songs from Soundcloud. In this post we will take a look at Facebook and how we can create a downloader for Facebook videos. It all started with me wanting to download a video from Facebook which I had the copyrights to. I wanted to automate the process so that I could download multiple videos with just one command.

Reverse Engineering Soundcloud API

Sun, 15 Apr 2018 06:19:49 +0000

Hi guys, in this post we will learn how to bypass downloading restrictions on Soundcloud. We will create a Python script which will allow us to download even those songs which are not enabled for downloading. We will work on this project in a step by step basis where we will tackle each problem as we encounter it. I will try to make it as universal in nature as possible so that you can follow this project even if Soundcloud has changed its website layout or the way it serves media files.

Monthly Roundup: February 2018

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 23:07:05 +0000

Hi guys! I hope you are all doing well! I am back with the a curation of the best articles, news and trending GitHub projects from February 2018. If you come across any articles, news, projects in March which you feel like should be a part of the next newsletter please reach out to me. I will love to add them to the list! I hope you enjoy this issue. If you do please share it with your social circle!

Controlling Your System Using Alexa (Tutorial)

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 18:25:26 +0000

Hi guys! I hope you are all doing fine. I have started working on a small compilation of projects which you can do under 24 hours. I will be publishing these projects in the form of tutorials on my blog. This is the first project and I hope you will enjoy doing it. Keep these two things in mind: You don’t need an actual Alexa to follow this tutorial. Amazon provides an online simulator which you can use I will be omitting the instructions on how to get a virtual environment up and running just so that I can keep this tutorial concise and to the point.

DocRaptor review

Fri, 26 Jan 2018 01:51:59 +0000

Hi everyone, I was recently contacted by the folks at DocRaptor telling me about their service so I decided to take it for a test drive and see for myself what it actually is. DocRaptor provides you with an API to generate PDF and XLS files from HTML and CSS files. Today we will take a look at how we can use it to generate the PDF for a payment receipt.

2017 was good, 2018 will be even better

Wed, 03 Jan 2018 18:51:24 +0000

This is not a programming or Python related post. This is more of my personal reflection on the year 2017. I decided to reflect and evaluate my year and see what I got done and what could have been better. Below I have listed some of the stuff which I was able to get done this year. Visited UK and Bahrain 🇬🇧🇧🇭 I love travelling and exploring new places. This year I got a chance to visit UK (Cambridge, Newcastle and London) and Bahrain (Manama).

How I got into programming

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 07:46:47 +0000

Hi everyone! I hope all of you are doing great. If you have been following my blog for a while and keeping a lookout at the comments then you might know a bit about me. If you don’t then today I am going to share my story. That’s me 🙂 I am freshman at Colgate university in upstate New York (more on this later). I have been programming since I was 12 years old and it all began because of an online multiplayer game called Club Penguin.

Introduction to Machine Learning and its Usage in Remote Sensing

Sat, 11 Nov 2017 21:34:35 +0000

Hey guys! I recently wrote a review paper regarding the use of Machine Learning in Remote Sensing. I thought that some of you might find it interesting and insightful. It is not strictly a Python focused research paper but is interesting nonetheless. Introduction to Machine Learning and its Usage in Remote Sensing 1. Introduction Machines have allowed us to do complex computations in short amounts of time. This has given rise to an entirely different area of research which was not being explored: teaching machines to predict a likely outcome by looking at patterns.

Weird Comparison Issue in Python

Sun, 15 Oct 2017 03:23:41 +0000

Hi guys! I am back with a new article. This time I will tackle a problem which seems easy enough at first but will surprize some of you. Suppose you have the following piece of code: a = 3 b = False c = """12""" d = 4.7 and you have to evaluate this: d + 2 * a > int(c) == b Before reading the rest of the post please take a minute to solve this statement in your head and try to come up with the answer.

Intermediate Python Book Anniversary

Wed, 27 Sep 2017 04:59:43 +0000

🙌 Hopefully this will be the last update regarding my book for a while. It has been 2 years ⏱ since I self-published my “Intermediate Python” book 📖. In just a short span of 2 years I can not thank Allah enough for the level of success the book has achieved. It has been translated into Chinese, Russian, Portuguese and Korean. A couple of days ago it hit the 🎉 🎉 520,000 readers mark 🎉🎉.

13 Python libraries to keep you busy

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 01:22:39 +0000

Hi guys! I was recently contacted by folks from AppDynamics (a part of CISCO). They shared an infographic with me which listed 13 Python libraries. These libraries were categorized in sections. I loved going through that infographic. I hope you guys will enjoy it too. Source: AppDynamics

PyCon Pakistan & The First Meetup in Lahore

Wed, 02 Aug 2017 06:28:13 +0000

Hi there guys! I will be starting my bachelors at Colgate University in Hamilton, US from this month. I have been pretty busy lately with making all of the required arrangements. However, during this time I got a chance to attend the first ever Python meetup in Lahore, Pakistan. It was hosted on July 22nd. I am a bit late with this write-up so without any further ado let’s get right into it.

Making a Reddit + Facebook Messenger Bot

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 20:31:41 +0000

Hi guys! I haven’t been programming a lot lately because of exams. However, on the past weekend I managed to get a hold of my laptop and crank out something useful. It was a Facebook messenger bot which servers you fresh memes, motivational posts, jokes and shower thoughts. It was the first time I had delved into bot creation. In this post I will teach you most of the stuff you need to know in order to get your bot off the ground.

Recovering lost Python source code if it’s still resident in-memory

Sun, 12 Mar 2017 18:38:04 +0000

I read this on GitHub Gist the other day. I don’t know whether I will ever use it but I am still putting this on my blog for the sake of bookmarking it. Who knows? Someone from the audience might end up using it! I screwed up using git (git checkout – on the wrong file) and managed to delete the code I had just written… but it was still running in a process in a docker container.

Importing with ctypes in Python: fighting overflows

Fri, 10 Mar 2017 11:31:41 +0000

Introduction On some cold winter night, we’ve decided to refactor a few examples and tests for Python wrapper in Themis, because things have to be not only efficient and useful, but elegant as well. One thing after another, and we ended up revamping Themis error codes a bit. Internal error and status flags sometimes get less attention than crypto-related code: they are internals for internal use. Problem is, when they fail, they might break something more crucial in a completely invisible way.

Your first talk

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 08:55:06 +0000

Hi there folks. It’s been a long time since I wrote on this blog. I have been very busy with university applications. A lot has happened recently which I will love to share with you. Firstly, I got a news from a friend that my book is being used in McGill University to teach Python programming. That is something I have always wanted, write a book which is used by well-known universities to teach programming.

Interesting Python Tutorials

Fri, 19 Aug 2016 16:58:01 +0000

Hi there folks! I have read some interesting Python tutorials lately. I would love to share them with you. Without any further ado let me list them over here:

1. Composing Music With Recurrent Neural Networks

I loved this tutorial. It is a bit old but still worth a read. The author has explained the theory behind his implementation. You will enjoy this tutorial if you are interested in signal processing, machine learning and/or music.

Intermediate Python conquers the World! (Almost)

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 18:51:01 +0000

Hi there folks! I hope you are all fine. It’s been almost a year since I published Intermediate Python. It was my life goal to publish a book which really helps people. Today I saw the stats of the book after a long time. I was pretty ecstatic to know that the English version (It is also available in Chinese and Russian) of the book has been read in 181 countries.

This Month I Inspired 40 Teens to Start Programming

Tue, 31 May 2016 15:10:44 +0000

Hi there folks! I have been wanting to write a post on this blog for quite some time now but life always gets in the way. This time it was my exams. Hopefully I will get free after the 4th of June and would get more time to write posts and do stuff which I love and care about. So enough with the rant now. I wanted to write about my latest endeavor.

Python Sorted Collections

Sun, 24 Apr 2016 05:57:47 +0000

Hey folks! This is a guest post by Grant Jenks. Let’s give him a warm welcome and get right on into what he has to say. 🙂 Hello all! I’m Grant Jenks and I’m guest-posting about one of my favorite topics: Python Sorted Collections. Python is a little unusual regarding sorted collection types as compared with other programming languages. Three of the top five programming languages in the TIOBE Index include sorted list, sorted dict or sorted set data types.

Intermediate Python is now Available in Chinese

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 18:37:00 +0000

Hi there folks! I am sure you all are fine. It’s been a long time since I wrote on this blog. I have some very important exams coming up due to which I was/am not able to provide the required time to this blog. I am happy to inform you that Intermediate Python is now available in Chinese! A small group of dedicated Chinese Pythonistas took it upon themselves to translate it.

Learning Python For Data Science

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 13:49:12 +0000

For those of you who wish to begin learning Python for Data Science, here is a list of various resources that will get you up and running. Included are things like online tutorials and short interactive course, MOOCs, newsletters, books, useful tools and more. We decided to put this together so that you can begin learning Data Science with Python right of the bat, without having to spend hours surfing the web in search of resources.

OCR on PDF files using Python

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 19:28:57 +0000

Hi there folks! You might have heard about OCR using Python. The most famous library out there is tesseract which is sponsored by Google. It is very easy to do OCR on an image. The issue arises when you want to do OCR over a PDF document. I am working on a project where I want to input PDF files, extract text from them and then add the text to the database.

Implementing Email Sending Functionality in a Django App

Wed, 27 Jan 2016 19:58:03 +0000

Hi there folks! Recently I was doing a task for fossasia which required me to make a Django web app which allowed users to submit their email addresses and receive a welcome email in return. I was able to complete the project in a couple of hours. Most of the time was spent in making the UI look good. I am going to show you how you can easily make a similar app.

My Google Code-In Experience with FOSSASIA

Sat, 23 Jan 2016 00:36:22 -0400

Hi folks. In two days Google Code-in is going to end. Now is a good time to look back and reflect upon what I learned and achieved through this event. In this post I will try to share my experience regarding Google Code-in and especially FOSSASIA (this is the organization which I worked with). This was/is my first Code-in. I didn’t have any experience before so I was not sure what to expect.

Scraping Euro Parliament Website Using Python

Fri, 22 Jan 2016 00:53:21 -0400

Hi guys! I hope you are fine. In this post I will show you how you can scrape public parliament data from the European Parliament website. In the European Parliament Members may pose written and oral questions to the European Institutions. Our task is to extract the answers to these questions. We will be using Python to accomplish this task. Let’s set up our directory and the app.py file. Setting up the directories

Python for Scientists

Wed, 06 Jan 2016 17:58:39 +0000

This is a guest post by Brian David Hall from codenhance.com. He develops tutorials and resources to help scientists learn to code, including his latest Kickstarter project, Learn the Command Line … for Science! Spoiler alert: in this post, I will argue that Python is the best programming language for scientists to learn. Forget Perl, Java, FORTRAN, IDL, or whatever else they were pushing when you got your degree. This type of discussion is usually emotionally charged – many a flame war has been fought over programming languages.

Looking for guest bloggers

Mon, 02 Nov 2015 12:32:06 +0000

Hi there folks! I am very busy now-a-days. You might already be aware of that due to the long pauses between posts. Therefore, I am searching for guest bloggers who would like to write about Python, it’s frameworks or literally anything interesting and informative related to Python. If you believe that you can do this then kindly drop me an email or post a comment below. I would love to hear from you.

Nice tutorials I bumped into recently

Mon, 07 Sep 2015 23:53:48 +0000

Hi guys! I am in the USA right now. I am here to attend a Hackathon at the University of Michigan called MHacks 6. This is my first ever Hackathon so I am very excited. So now without wasting any time let’s get down to business. I recently came across a lot of nice tutorials which I believe might be useful for you guys. I am listing them below in no particular order:

Free Python GUI development course

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 07:51:38 +0000

Hi there folks! 👋 I have a good news for you. I have got two coupons for a video course on Udemy. The name of the course is “Learn Python GUI programming using Qt framework” and costs $79. It is taught by Bogdan Milanovich. I have taken this course previously when I was just getting started with GUI development in Python. At the time when I took this course it was incomplete but now it appears as if the instructor has completed the course.

Intermediate Python Released!

Mon, 17 Aug 2015 06:15:18 +0000

Hey folks! I am feeling really proud to announce the completion of my very own book. After a lot of hard-work and sheer determination this became possible and “Intermediate Python” saw the light of day. It will receive updates over time 🙂 Python is an amazing language with a strong and friendly community of programmers. However, there is a lack of documentation on what to learn after getting the basics of Python down your throat.

My Story

Sun, 26 Jul 2015 12:48:41 +0000

Hi guys. Recently my interview was published over at Mouse vs Python blog which is run by Mike. I am glad that I was able to become a part of Mike’s PyDev of the week series. This post is not going to be technical. I am going to use my time to clear up my mind through this post. Firstly, a lot of new programmers ask me how to learn Python.

4 Command-line tools for more Python productivity

Sat, 20 Jun 2015 21:02:19 +0000

Hi there folks. In this post I would be sharing a couple of command-line tools which can help to increase your python productivity. These tools have helped me a lot and might help you as well! This post is inspired by another post. IPython IPython is the Python REPL on steroids. It has some really nice editions on top of the standard REPL. I am sure that if you use it once you will fall in love with it.

The Bite Python Newsletter is now official

Tue, 09 Jun 2015 08:17:12 +0000

Hi there guys! If you have been following my recent posts then you might know that I have started a newsletter. This newsletter covers everything related to Python which I come across every week. It was just a part time project. I used to send emails without any schedule. Now I have decided to give it the focus and energy which it demands. For that I have made a schedule. The newsletter will be sent out every Sunday if everything goes well.

Why should you use namedtuple instead of a tuple?

Fri, 05 Jun 2015 19:21:31 +0000

Hi there guys! You might already be acquainted with tuples. A tuple is a lightweight object type which allows to store a sequence of immutable Python objects. They are just like lists but have a few key differences. The major one is that unlike lists, you can not change a value in a tuple. In order to access the value in a tuple you use integer indexes like: man = ('Ali', 30) print(man[0]) # Output: Ali Well, so now what are namedtuples?

My very own book in the making

Tue, 28 Apr 2015 21:10:30 +0000

Hi there folks. I am writing a book on Python tips, tricks and patterns. This will be a short book of nearly 100 pages. I have already written about 56 pages. I would be self-publishing it in July or August. I am pretty sure that you would love this book. Here is an unsorted list of content which I have already written about: args_and_kwargs debugging generators map_&_filter set_-_data_structure ternary_operators decorators global_&_return mutation __slots__magic virtual_environment collections enumerate object_introspection comprehensions exceptions lambdas one_liners for_-_else open_function targeting_python_2_3 coroutines function_caching Do note that this list of included content is subject to change as it is just a rough draft right now.

Books

Mon, 20 Apr 2015 07:45:48 +0000

I have listed the books in an ascending level of difficulty. Check them out and enjoy :). How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Second Interactive Edition Author: B. Miller & D. Ranum Difficulty: Beginner This interactive book teaches you Python the interactive way, right in the browser. Learn Python The Hard Way Author: Zed A. Shaw Difficulty: Beginner Have you always wanted to learn how to code but never thought you could?

Nifty Python tricks

Sun, 19 Apr 2015 05:04:08 +0000

Hi there folks. It’s been a long time since I last published a post. I have been busy. However in this post I am going to share some really informative tips and tricks which you might not have known about. So without wasting any time lets get straight to them: Enumerate Instead of doing: i = 0 for item in iterable: print i, item i += 1 We can do:

Month in review – Articles and news

Wed, 18 Mar 2015 16:18:29 +0000

Hi folks. In this post I am going to share some great articles which I recently got across. Apart from that I would also be sharing some news relating to Python. Articles Python Descriptors This IPython notebook was really helpful for me to learn about descriptors and properties in Python. It is topic which is greatly shadowed in a lot of Python books. This Notebook would be really beneficial for you if you want to grasp the concept in an effective and understandable manner.

A guide to finding books in images using Python and OpenCV.

Wed, 11 Mar 2015 17:30:50 +0000

This is a guest post by Adrian Rosebrock from PyImageSearch.com, a blog all about computer vision, image processing, and building image search engines. I always tell people that if they want to learn to write well they need to do two things: Practice writing often. Read. A lot. It seems strange, doesn’t it? How reading often can dramatically improve your writing ability. But it’s absolutely true. Reading authors that like you can actually engrain their vernacular into your own writing style.

Want suggestions for next post

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 11:45:24 +0000

Hi there guys. I am Yasoob 🙂 As you know that writing quality tutorials take plenty of time so I was thinking that I should take your suggestion about the next article. These days I have been doing quite a lot of projects. Let me share the details of two of these projects. Extracting routes information from Google maps This project was not an ordinary project. As most of you know that Google maps provide an API to programmatically access it, there was a problem with it.

Best Python IDEs

Thu, 09 Oct 2014 12:32:57 +0000

Hi there guys. It is becoming really difficult for me to continue writing quality posts. If anyone of you would like to guest post then feel free to contact me. I get a lot of questions regarding the best IDE for Python so in this post I am going to list some of them for you so that you can stop asking and start working. Quality IDEs PyCharm Sublime Text NinjaIDE Wingware Komodo These are some of the IDEs I had the pleasure of working with.

An intro to Deque module

Tue, 01 Jul 2014 20:40:04 +0000

Hi there folks. Recently I got to know about the Python deque module. It is a part of the collections library. It provides you with a double ended queue which means that you can append and delete elements from either side of the list. So without wasting any time lets begin. First of all you have to import the deque module from the collections library. This can be done by typing:

[Book review] Python 101

Mon, 30 Jun 2014 19:03:04 +0000

Hi guys. So I am trying to get up to speed with my blog because lately I have not been posting a lot and due to this my blog is becoming stagnant. In this post I am going to write a book review. My friend Mike from The Mouse Vs The Python Blog recently wrote a book with the name of Python 101. He is a really talented blogger and programmer and I was waiting anxiously to read his brand new book, Python 101.

EuroPython 2014 and me

Sun, 29 Jun 2014 18:51:09 +0000

Hi guys! It’s been really long since I last posted on this blog. I was a little busy these past few days. A lot has been happening. I also got two job offers, although compelling but I still refused, so that I could focus on school for now. However, here I am, back to you guys! I would like to share some huge news with you. Guess what? I will be giving a presentation at EuroPython this year!

Misconceptions about Skype local database

Sat, 19 Apr 2014 12:11:25 +0000

Hi there guys. Recently I wrote an article with the name of “I didn’t know Skype stores your data in a local database without a password!”. After publishing that article I got a lot of response from people like you and I came to know that it is not a vulnerability. It is so because the database is stored in the “appdata” directory which can only be accessed by the administrator which means that only an administrator account can open it.

I didn’t know Skype stores your data in a local database without a password!

Fri, 18 Apr 2014 19:07:53 +0000

Hi guys! How are you? I hope you are doing great. Recently I came to know that Skype (video conferencing software) stores a local database with almost all information of a user who has logged on to skype from that computer. You might be thinking “So what? A lot of apps do that, right?”. Yes you are right. This is mostly done to increase speed. It’s like caching the content so that whenever you log in again to your account you don’t have to wait to see your contacts.

The Heartbleed bug

Sat, 12 Apr 2014 08:11:44 +0000

Hi guys! I haven’t been posting a lot recently. There are a couple of problems which have joined up and have kept me away from my computer. I will cover those reasons in the next post. So what this post is about? Are you a sys-admin or a web master? If you are one then the chances are that you have already heard of the heartbleed bug. But for those who are unaware of this, let me explain.

[Giveaway] 3 copies of Tkinter GUI Application Development Hotshot

Sat, 08 Mar 2014 13:19:16 +0000

Win Free Copies of new book - Tkinter GUI Application Development Hotshot Hi guys! Welcome back. As I recently told you that I will be holding a giveaway, the day has finally come. You will be pleased to know that I have teamed up with Packt Publishing to organize a Giveaway of the new book that I have reviewed - Tkinter GUI Application Development Hotshot And three lucky winners stand a chance to win 3 digital copies of this book.

Neckbeard Republic gone completely free!

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 20:00:57 +0000

So guys I have a good news for you. If you keep up with latest news regarding Python then you might have heard about Neckbeard Republic in the past. If you haven’t then let me tell you that Neckbeard Republic is a series of bite sized Python screen-casts created by the awesome Mahdi. It used to be paid. Only a few screen-casts were free. The paid ones required you to pay $9 monthly membership fee.

ImportError: No module named resource_rc

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 19:40:23 +0000

Hi there folks. How are you? Recently I was using Qt Designer to design a GUI for one of my apps. After doing all the designing I saved my ui file and ran pyuic4 over it. Everything worked fine and I had a Python ui file created in my system. But when I tried to run the Python ui file I was confronted with an error. It read something like this:

Using py2exe the right way

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 11:58:30 +0000

Hi guys how are you? I hope all of you are fine. Recently I was working on a PyQt project. The project was youtube-dl-GUI. It is a GUI for the ever popular youtube-dl project. After writing all the code I decided to make an exe in order to ease the deployment of my project on windows. For this purpose I decided to use py2exe which suited best to my needs. However it is necessary to know that py2exe is not the only Python to exe compiler out there.

[Book review] Tkinter GUI Application Development HOTSHOT

Sat, 22 Feb 2014 18:49:12 +0000

Hi guys. You might have noticed that I am not so active. The reason is that I am developing a couple of my projects as a hobby. Due to that I didn’t have a lot of time to blog. Nevertheless I will continue to write interesting posts once or twice a week. So what this post is about? Well recently I was contacted by Packt Publishers to write a book review.

If you could change something in Python what would it be?

Sat, 08 Feb 2014 18:22:41 +0000

Hi there guys. Recently I posted a question on Reddit. The question was that if you could change something in Python what would it be? I got some really interesting answers from other programmers. Here are some of the top answers till now. Make building a stand alone executable part of the spec. The two main projects that do it are hacks the namespaces in the datetime module. its really annoying to have to remember if I used import datetime # vs.

Free Python books

Mon, 03 Feb 2014 19:02:12 +0000

Hi there guys. I am back again with yet another useful post. This one is going to be about free Python books. Most new Python programmers don’t realise that there are great Python books out there for free and due to their lack of knowledge they pay for expensive ones. Most of these books have the same high quality material which you would expect from a paid book. So without wasting any time let me list them here.

Python 101: Writing a cleanup script

Thu, 23 Jan 2014 16:58:47 +0000

So hi there guys! I hope you are fine. So what is in this post? Today we will be writing a cleanup script. The idea for this post came from Mike Driscol who recently wrote a very useful post about writing a cleanup script in python. So how is my post different from his post? In my post I will be using path.py. When I used path.py for the first time I just fell in love with it.

The open function explained

Wed, 15 Jan 2014 13:19:30 +0000

This is a guest post by Philipp. open opens a file. Pretty simple, eh? Most of the time, we see it being used like this: f = open('photo.jpg', 'r+') jpgdata = f.read() f.close() The reason I am writing this article is that most of the time, I see open used like this: There are three errors in the above code. Can you spot them all? If not, read on. By the end of this article, you’ll know what’s wrong in the above code, and, more importantly, be able to avoid these mistakes in your own code.

Future Plans and logit-bin

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 23:00:35 +0000

Oh hi there guys. Its been really a long time since I wrote my last post. Don’t think that I forgot about you guys. I was just super busy last couple of days. Firstly, it was my exams. But I am happy to tell you guys that they went well 😄 Secondly I had a competition coming up so I remained a lot busy. So what about the next post. The next post which is currently in draft form is “writing cleanup script in python”.

Python decorators finally demystified

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 16:09:59 +0000

Hi there guys! I hope all of you are fine and doing well. Recently I was hanging out on a python related IRC where I got a request from someone to write an article on decorators in Python. It is perhaps one of the most difficult concept to grasp. So as usual without wasting anytime let get on with it. Everything in python is an object (Functions too!): First of all let’s understand functions in python:

Kivy 101: How to Use BoxLayouts

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 18:34:11 +0000

This was a guest post by Mike Driscoll. Recently I’ve started learning about Kivy, a Python Natural User Interface (NUI) toolkit. As I understand it, Kivy is kind of a spiritual successor to pyMT, which you can read more about here. In this article, we will be learning how Kivy handles layout management. While you can position widgets using x/y coordinates, in every GUI toolkit I’ve used, it’s almost always better to use some kind of layout management that the toolkit provides.

Reverse engineering myspace

Fri, 22 Nov 2013 20:44:01 +0000

Hi guys! In todays post we will be looking into myspace.com and check whether it is possible to download songs with python or not. If it is possible then we will make a python script which will assist us in downloading the songs. Tools python - I am using py2k browser - I am using chrome rtmpdump & rtmpsrv internet connection So lets start. Lets go to myspace:

Introduction to unittest

Fri, 15 Nov 2013 18:04:58 +0000

Hi there folks. I recently thought that I have not written even a single post about testing in python. Testing is one of the most important part of any language. In this post I am going to share some information about unittest with you. So what exactly is unittest? You might have heard about it on StackOverflow or some other forum. It is a testing framework for python just like Junit for Java.

New Python books

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 18:35:41 +0000

Hi everyone! Welcome back to yet another article. This one is going to be short. In this post I will be sharing two new books which have recently come out. So without wasting any time lets look at them. Tkinter GUI Application Development Hotshot Its been a long time since we saw a new Tkinter book out there. This book has received some good critics by the professional python programmers. According to the overview given on the website you will :

Some Python projects worth looking at

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 18:30:57 +0000

Hi there guys. So a lot has happened while I was away. It has been only a few weeks and a whole ton of great python project have emerged. In this post I will share a list of some of the excellent projects I saw in the past few days. So lets take a look at them without wasting any more time.

PyDev 3.0 Released

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 17:18:49 +0000

Hi there folks. Its been a long time since I posted here. That was because my studies were giving me some problems. So no worrys because the problems are all resolved and I am back with yet another news. So what is PyDev ? If you have been coding python scripts with eclipse (it’s an IDE) then the chances are that you know what PyDev is

Python 3.4 to be equipped with pip by default

Tue, 22 Oct 2013 16:59:27 +0000

Hi there Pythonistas. A news has arrived that pip will be available by default with python 3.4. PEP 453 which was “Explicit bootstrapping of pip in Python installations” has been accepted. Python 3.4 which has entered into the beta phase after the release of final alpha will have pip by default. If you are new to python then you might be wondering what pip is ? Pip is a tool for installing and managing Python packages.

PyCharm 3.0 Community Edition

Tue, 22 Oct 2013 16:43:23 +0000

The makers of the hugely popular Python IDE PyCharm recently announced a community edition of their Python IDE. JetBrains announced that they will be offering a community Edition of PyCharm however it will have some stripped down features for example it will not have builtin support for pyramid etc. However the news for a Community version of PyCharm became hot in the python community recently because PyCharm is currently the best IDE available for Python.

Python News 13 Oct 2013

Sun, 13 Oct 2013 20:59:27 +0000

Hi folks in this post i am going to share with you news from the python world. This is like a roundup of monthly news. Latest News NHS drops Oracle for Python, Riak, Redis, RabbitMQ, Tornado, Flask and more The UK government’s quest to get public services to use more open source technologies seems to be taking hold, judging by the revamp of the NHS’s very large Spine service.

All About Decorators in Python

Thu, 10 Oct 2013 16:18:07 +0000

Hi there fellas. This is an answer posted on stackoverflow by e-satis. The original link to the answer is given at the end. No credit goes to me. All of the credit goes to the original author. This answer is posted just because most of us are unaware of how decorators work in python and this answer solves that problem beautifully. Python’s functions are objects To understand decorators, you must first understand that functions are objects in Python.

The Python yield keyword explained

Sun, 29 Sep 2013 16:34:22 +0000

Hi there folks. Again welcome to yet another useful tutorial. This is again a stackoverflow answer. This one is related to the Python yield keyword. It explains you what yield, generators and iterables are. So without wasting any time lets continue with the answer. To understand what yield does, you must understand what generators are. And before generators come iterables. Iterables When you create a list, you can read its items one by one, and it’s called iteration:

Python Quick Reference v2.7

Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:24:21 +0000

Hi there everyone. We all have experienced that time when we say “what was that function called?”, “was it called get_attr() or post_attr()?” Recently I came across a wonderful Python Quick Reference for version 2.7. It contains some useful information. I hope you will find it very useful just like me. So here is the link. Go forward and get it. You will not regret it. Do tell me in the comments that whether you like it or not or do you want something to be added to it.

All about the metaclasses in Python!

Fri, 20 Sep 2013 14:41:26 +0000

Hi there pythonistas. Recently I was searching about metaclasses in Python and came across a very good explanation about metaclasses on stackoverflow. I found the answer really helpful so I think you should read it as well. Who knows when you might find something useful in there. Disclaimer: very long post. Classes as objects Before understanding metaclasses, you need to master classes in Python. And Python has a very peculiar idea of what classes are, borrowed from the Smalltalk language.

Making a Reddit + twitter Bot

Sat, 14 Sep 2013 14:45:49 +0000

Hi there pythonistas. I hope you are all fine. In this post I am going to teach you how we can make a Reddit + Twitter bot. What this bot will do is that it will copy post titles and url from any subreddit that you want and then it will post them to twitter keeping the 140 characters length in mind. Firstly let me tell you what Reddit is. Reddit is a social link sharing site where good links are upvoted and bad links are down voted.

A surprize for you

Mon, 09 Sep 2013 14:10:01 +0000

Hi there pythonistas. You might have noticed that I haven’t been active much on this blog. There’s a reason for that. I was preparing a PyCon talk. Yes I was really preparing a PyCon talk. The title of the talk is “Web Scraping in Python”. I have submitted the proposal and now I am waiting for it’s acceptance (or rejection). Do pray for it’s acceptance and after that you will be able to see me in Montreal next year 😉.

Making a twitter bot in python

Wed, 04 Sep 2013 16:53:13 +0000

Hi there guys. I hope you are fine. In this post I am going to tell you how you can make a twitter auto favouriter or a.k.a Twitter Bot. I am not going to make a twitter follower as it will get you banned quickly if you use it a lot. This post is going to help you to increase your twitter followers organically. By organically I mean that your followers will be those who really want to listen to your content.

Python Resources

Sun, 01 Sep 2013 10:40:59 +0000

Contents Beginner’s Delight Resources for Women Why Python? Style Guide and Idioms Dictionary Decorators Generators Coroutines Iterators Yield Context Managers Unicode Networking Metaclasses Documentation Sphinx Debugging Logging Testing Environments and Environment Management Profiling Packaging Deployment Fabric Warts and Gotchas Web Frameworks Flask Web2Py Django Bottle Tornado Web Servers API and Web Services Scraping Mobile Development Kivy Google Glass Resources Libraries GUI Programming Android SL4A WSGI Databases SQLAlchemy Data Mining Data Analysis Pandas IPython Notebooks Design Patterns Concurrency Patterns Concurrency and Distributed Systems Functional Programming Python 2 vs Python 3 Porting to Python 3 Books Free Paid Online Courses and Challenges Discussions Conferences and Events Videos Editors and IDE’s for Python programming Big Data Curated Python resources from other websites Newsletters Miscellaneous Beginner’s Delight Beginner’s guide to Python The Hitchhiker’s guide to Python Learn Python the hard way Learn Python Google’s Python class Python tracks at Codecademy Python Monk Python for Beginners Best way to learn python Python Tips, tools and resources Python Koans: Learn Python through TDD LearnStreet Python course Beginner projects for a python newbie Learn X in Y minutes – Python Python Practice book Python tools and software Facts and myths about Python names and values _args and *_kwargs in python explained In Python, it’s all about the attributes Common newbie mistakes in Python- Part 1 Common newbie mistakes in Python- Part 2 PySchools Some cool Python Tricks if x and if x is not None Better Python APIs Declaring dependencies in Python Storing and Loading Data with JSON – Serialization/deserialization A Guide to Python’s Magic Methods Efficient String Concatenation in Python Be Pythonic: init.

Best Python Resources for Beginners and Professionals

Sun, 01 Sep 2013 10:37:31 +0000

Beginner’s Delight Beginner’s guide to Python The Hitchhiker’s guide to Python Learn Python the hard way Google’s Python class Python for Beginners Python tracks at Codecademy Python Monk Best way to learn python Python Tips, tools and resources Python Koans: Learn Python through TDD LearnStreet Python course Beginner projects for a python newbie Learn X in Y minutes – Python Python Practice book Facts and myths about Python names and values _args and *_kwargs in python explained Common newbie mistakes in Python- Part 1 Common newbie mistakes in Python- Part 2 PySchools Some cool Python Tricks http://blog.

Simple Sudoku solver in python

Sat, 31 Aug 2013 20:43:16 +0000

Hi there pythonistas! We all know that Sudoku is a great game. Some of us even bet on this game but did you know that you can use python to make a Sudoku solver? In this post I am going to share with you a Sudoku solver written in python. From now on you will win all Sudoku challenges. However let me tell you that I am not the original writer of this script.

Fixing error – maximum recursion depth reached

Fri, 30 Aug 2013 19:35:34 +0000

Hi there folks. In this post I am going to teach you how to increase the recursion depth in python. Most of us at some time get this error: RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded If you want to fix this error just increase the default recursion depth limit but how to do it? Just import the sys module in your script and in the beginning of the script type this:

Looking Inside Dropbox – whitepaper

Fri, 30 Aug 2013 09:53:43 +0000

Hi there folks. We all know that dropbox is made in python. It’s website is made with pyramid and it’s desktop applications are made with python. The existing Python bytecode reversing techniques are not enough for reversing hardened applications like Dropbox. Recently I came accross a whitepaper written by Dhiru Kholia and Przemysław Wegrzyn. This paper presents new and generic techniques, to reverse engineer frozen Python applications, which are not limited to just the Dropbox world.

Finding the module version

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 03:57:05 +0000

Hi there folks. I know I have not been active recently and it was because I was not in town. I was in Canada. So this post will be short. In this post i will show you how you can find the version number of any python module. Sometimes you need to find the version number in order to know whether you have the desired version of the module or not.

Making a song downloader with python

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 17:50:38 +0000

Edit: This post is about ex.fm which is not functioning anymore. ex.fm has closed their operations 😢 Hi there folks. Some time ago i was very much interested in how music downloaders for various websites worked. In order to learn this i went forward to make my own downloader for ex.fm. Currently ex.fm does not allow users to download songs so this was a very good chance for me to learn song downloading with python.

Storing and Loading Data with JSON

Wed, 07 Aug 2013 23:55:19 +0000

We’ve already learned about pickle, so why do we need another way to (de)serialize Python objects to(from) disk or a network connection? There are three major reasons to prefer JSON over pickle: When you’re unpickling data, you’re essentially allowing your data source to execute arbitrary Python commands. If the data is trustworthy (say stored in a sufficiently protected directory), that may not be a problem, but it’s often really easy to accidentally leave a file unprotected (or read something from network).

The self variable in python explained

Tue, 06 Aug 2013 21:21:30 +0000

Hi everyone! In this post I am going to teach you about the self variable in python. I have seen many beginners struggling to grasp the concept of self variable. If you are one of them then this post is for you. So lets start by making a class involving the self variable. A simple class So here is our class: class Restaurant(object): bankrupt = False def open_branch(self): if not self.

Python socket network programming

Mon, 05 Aug 2013 21:06:28 +0000

Hi there fellows. In this post I am going to take you on an adventure with python sockets. They are the real backbones behind web browsing. In simpler terms there is a server and a client. We will deal with the client first. So lets first begin by importing the socket library and making a simple socket. import socket s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) Here we made a socket instance and passed it two parameters.

*args and **kwargs in python explained

Sun, 04 Aug 2013 13:14:17 +0000

Hi there folks. I have come to see that most new python programmers have a hard time figuring out the *args and **kwargs magic variables. So what are they? First of all let me tell you that it is not necessary to write *args or **kwargs. Only the * (aesteric) is necessary. You could have also written *var and **vars. Writing *args and **kwargs is just a convention. So now lets take a look at *args first.

Making a url shortener in python

Sat, 03 Aug 2013 04:54:10 +0000

Hi there fellas. Today in this post i am going to show you how we can use python to make bulk urls tiny. Let me clear that we are not making a url shortening SERVICE instead what we are going to do is that we are going to unofficially use the tinyurl api (Tinyurl is a url shortening service). There’s not any official python api released by tinyurl. So lets begin with this:

5 quality screencasts worth watching

Fri, 02 Aug 2013 13:27:46 +0000

Hello there fellas. I am back with another list of useful resources. This time i am going to share with you 5 quality python screen casts worth watching. Unlike ruby there are not really much quality screen casts related to python out there. So without wasting a dime lets continue with the list of those screen casts. So here it is: The first one if Encoding Specifiers and Magical Mode Lines in python.

What is Pickle in python?

Fri, 02 Aug 2013 03:59:33 +0000

Hi there fellas. In this post i am going to tell you about pickle. It is used for serializing and de-serializing a Python object structure. Any object in python can be pickled so that it can be saved on disk. What pickle does is that it “serialises” the object first before writing it to file. Pickling is a way to convert a python object (list, dict, etc.) into a character stream.

10 inspirations for your next python project

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 18:27:34 +0000

Hi there fellow coders. I know those times when we don’t know what to code. I am sure you must have experienced that time as well. Today i am going to share with you 10 python projects that will serve as an inspiration for your next python project. So without wasting a time here’s the list. Pillow. Pillow is the “friendly” PIL fork by Alex Clark and Contributors. PIL is the Python Imaging Library by Fredrik Lundh and Contributors.

Packaging and distributing your python libraries

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 09:51:08 +0000

Hi there fellow coders. This post will go over the basics of packaging and deploying your python libraries. So without wasting a minute lets get started.. Folder structure So first thing first. What should be your folder structure? At minimum you can have only two files. The first one should be the setup.py file and the second one should be your module file. But today I am not going to talk about the very basics.

Connecting to Sqlite databases

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 19:48:33 +0000

Hi there fellas. Today i am going to teach you how to use sqlite databases with python. This post will cover the basics of making and using a sqlite database with python using the sqlite3 library. Okay lets get started. Firstly if you are using python 2.5 or greater then you will have sqlite3 installed otherwise you will have to install it. Creating and connecting to a database So how do you make a database in python using the sqlite3 library?

Give me an idea for an Ebook

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 15:41:49 +0000

Hi there fellas. Today i am going to ask you for a favour. I am going to write an ebook about python. I want you to give me some ideas about what i should write. This Ebook is going to be short. It will be between 10 to 20 pages because it’s my first ebook. Currently i have two topics in mind. The first one is to write an introductory ebook about how to get started with python.

10 python blogs worth following

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 09:19:42 +0000

Hi there fellow programmers. I remember those days when i started learning python. I was always eager to find new blogs about python but found just a handful of them. This is one of the reason i started this blog. To spread my knowledge about python to other fellow coders. Today i am going to try to provide you 10 links to different python blogs that are worth following. By that i mean they are regularly updated and have useful info.

20 Python libraries you can’t live without

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 18:44:50 +0000

Hi there fellas. Today i am going to list 20 python libraries which have been a part of my toolbelt and should be a part of yours as well. So here they are: Requests. The most famous http library written by Kenneth Reitz. It’s a must have for every python developer. Scrapy. If you are involved in webscraping then this is a must have library for you.

Targeting python 2 and 3 at the same time.

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 14:58:06 +0000

Hi there pythonistas. Today i am not going to write a lengthy tutorial about how to make your programs compatible with python 2 and 3 at the same time, but i am going to share a simple tip with you guys which will help you achieve this target. Just imagine that you have a very popular python module which is use by hundreds of people but not all of them have python 2 or 3.

What is virtualenv and why you should use it.

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 09:02:12 +0000

Have you ever heard of virtualenv? The chances are that if you are a beginner then you might not have heard about it but if you are a seasoned programmer than it’s a vital part of your toolset. So what is virtualenv really? Virtualenv is a tool which allows us to make isolated python environments. How does making isolated python environments help us? Imagine you have an application that needs version 2 of a LibraryBar, but another application requires version 2.

Exception handling

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 21:03:40 +0000

Okay so the chances are you already know about exception handling in python but some new programmers don’t. How do you handle exceptions in python? First let me tell you what exceptions are. Exceptions are when something unexpected happens with your code. Just think that you writing a huge program which browses the internet and accesses web pages, the program works fine on your side and you consider packaging and distributing it.

Python install location and version

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 19:17:34 +0000

Have you ever wondered how to check the install path of python and it’s version? If you have then this post is for you. It is very easy to check the version and install location of python on linux as well as on windows. First I will show the method of checking this on linux and then on windows. On linux just type these two commands in the terminal: # for python install path root@bt:/$ which python /usr/bin/python # for python version; root@bt:/usr/bin$ python -V Python 2.

Coding styles for python

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 15:08:16 +0000

Yet another useful post and this one is about coding styles in python. Everyone has his own coding style in python. Here i am going to post some links that will help you to choose your own coding style in python. The first link is undoubtedly from the official python documentation as python documentation has everything to get you started. This link will teach you how to use python and how not to use python.

Setting up python on windows

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 11:44:11 +0000

Hi there pythonistas. Most of the new python programmers don’t know how to correctly install python on windows. Today I am going to share clean and clear instructions on how to install python on a Windows 7 machine. There are only 4 steps involved so without wasting a minute lets get started. Visit the official Python download page and grab the Windows installer. Choose the 32-bit version. (A 64-bit version is available, but there are compatibility issues with some modules you may want to install later.

Packaging your python scripts.

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 09:42:38 +0000

Oh hi there! Welcome to another useful post. This post is going to be about how to package your python scripts and packages for distribution on PyPI or some other place. Here I won’t go too deep into explaining everything as most of us just need to know the basics of packaging. However i will provide you with different links for further study. Okay lets talk about setuptools first. What is it?

Dictionaries have a get() method

Sun, 28 Jul 2013 19:59:13 +0000

Okay here we are with yet another post. However this post is going to be short as in this post i am going to teach you a small, simple and very useful trick. Have you ever tried to access a value from a dictionary and got an exception that there is no value mapped to that key? Like this: >>> dict = {'key1':2,'key2':3} >>> dict['key1'] 2 >>> dict['key3'] Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in dict['key3'] KeyError: 'key3' Sometimes you do not want anything like this because this error can break your whole program and make it useless until you fix this issue.

The use of return and global keywords

Sun, 28 Jul 2013 18:52:08 +0000

Okay so here we have another post. This post is about the return keyword. you might have encountered some functions written in python which have a return keyword in the end of the function. Do you know what it does? Lets examine this little function: >>> def add(value1,value2): ... return value1 + value2 >>> result = add(3,5) >>> print result 8 The function above takes two values as input and then output their addition.

Generating a random string

Sun, 28 Jul 2013 12:40:54 +0000

Okay, so, most of us do not know how to generate random strings which include letters and digits. This can be really useful for generating a password (or, you know, stuff to aid you in your plan for world domination). So how do we generate a random string? Have you ever heard of the string module available in python? Chances are, you haven’t. So what does this module provide us? Okay here you go lets understand this module by example:

What is init.py ?

Sun, 28 Jul 2013 11:00:30 +0000

Okay yet another useful post. This post is really important and useful for anyone just starting out with python. So what is the __init__.py file ? Files name __init__.py are used to mark directories on disk as Python package directories. If you have the following files: mydir/spam/__init__.py mydir/spam/module.py and mydir is on your path, you can import the code in module.py as import spam.module or from spam import module If you remove the __init__.

The with statement

Sun, 28 Jul 2013 10:23:14 +0000

So the chances are that you already know about the with statement but some of us do not know about it. Lets face the reality the with statement saves us a lot of time and reduces our code base. Just imagine you are opening a file width python and then saving something to it. You would normally do: file = open('file.txt','w') file.write("freepythontips.wordpress.com") file.close() But what if an exception occurs while writing to file ?

A simple python server

Sat, 27 Jul 2013 21:25:44 +0000

I guess it’s not a simple python server. It is really simple and easy to deploy python server. Just imagine you want to share a folder on your pc with someone on your network. What you will do? Obviously you will start the sharing service but what if you have python installed and want an easier solution? Here you go. You can just type in: $ python -m SimpleHTTPServer This should be typed in the terminal or command prompt if you are a windows guy.

In-place value swapping

Sat, 27 Jul 2013 21:08:51 +0000

Okay so this is kinda new for some of us. If you are a seasoned programmer then this might not be surprising for you but if you are a new programmer then this is something you really need to know. Okay so here we go. In normal situations if you would want to swap the values of two variables then this would be something you would go after: a = 1 b = 2 c = a a = b b = c But there’s a more simple method which will merely take three lines.

The beginning of a new blog.

Sat, 27 Jul 2013 20:29:22 +0000

Hi there! Today, I am beginning my very own personal blog related to Python. Let me first tell you who I am. I am a computer programmer from Pakistan. I have made a lot open source contributions. I have contributed mainly to youtube-dl. It’s a python script which allows you to download videos from various websites like youtube, facebook, dailymotion, metacafe, etc. I also run a website with the name of http://www.