Motivation When dealing with databases you will need the ability to store certain dates and/or timestamps in your tables. Let’s find out how you can do that in an SQLite database. SQL table creation SQLite has the data type TIMESTAMP for storing date-times CREATE TABLE social_media ( social_media_id INTEGER, insertion_date TIMESTAMP, yt_subs INTEGER fb_pg INTEGER…
Motivation If you had less menial manual work you could sit at the beach and relax more often 🙂 So regarding my pain points I figured out that publishing articles to my blog takes a huge amount of time too. In order to publish an article I need to: Log in into the WordPress backend…
Motivation Sometimes you need to translate text from one language to another. I for example often write articles in German but want to have them in English for this blog. For this use case you can use google’s translation function in the browser. But wouldn’t it be sweet to automate this task and spare some…
Motivation When learning a specific language it is essential that you also learn the built-in functionality which gives you leverage. In Python there are often so called pythonic ways to solve problems like lambdas, filter function or enumerate. Tools that save you time when addressing real world problems. Use case Sometimes you want to do…
Motivation Sometimes you need a configuration for your project to adapt to different environments. The easiest way is to alter some variables / constants in your program code. But Hold your horses. This isn’t always a good idea. What if you package your code into an executable with e.g. PyInstaller? Maybe the user of your…
Motivation Sometimes you need information about your system e.g. which Python version your program is running on. Enter the sys module Import import sys How to find the currently active Python interpreter current_interpreter = sys.executable assert current_interpreter == “/Users/jb/PycharmProjects/blog_content_creatronix/venv311/bin/python” How find out about your Python version sys.version assert sys.version == “3.11.0rc1 (v3.11.0rc1:41cb07120b, Aug 5 2022,…
Motivation When you are dealing with files and directories or operating system version and environment variables the os module needs to become your friend os Get current working directory import os print(os.getcwd()) Get platform info os.name == “nt” # Windows os.name == “posix” # Linux and macOS Get environment variables assert os.environ.get(“FOO”) == “BAR” os.path…
Motivation Learning the programming language Python is easy but becoming a proficient developer can be quite cumbersome: Python has a complex ecosystem of package / dependency management, some finicky language details and of course you should learn some tricks of the trade as well. So here is the place to start your journey into the…
Motivation Although Python has a ton of built-in features and the ecosystem is full of useful pip-installable packages sometimes you need to fire up some external tools os.system The simplest form of launching external tools is the os.system function import os os.system(“echo Hello from the other side!”) subprocess module The subprocess module is Python’s…
Motivation Sometimes you want to know how fast your code is. Before you start implementing a timer use the Python built-in timeit module. #measurewhatmatters Example Let’s take a simple function like a recursive implementation of factorial: def factorial(n): if n > 0: return n * factorial(n-1) else: return 1 If you want to test how…