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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I did a “game design” school when I was younger, but couldn’t get a job as a programmer. Worked for a laboratory for a little over a year, and then went back to school to get a software engineering degree. I was 28 when I went into it, worked with “youngsters” of 18 years and older. It was completely fine.

    I’m now 50k in debt, but I’m also making twice as much as I did with my minimally paying job at the laboratory. It’s going to be a boon in the long run, IMO.

    Then, luck should be taken into account. Once you are done with your degree, perhaps the market will have recovered a bit, because I’m hearing a lot of negative feedback lately.

    edit: If you’re not sure, you can take a peek at this graph of free MIT YouTube courses. Choose something interesting on the right, then figure out where to start on the left to get to your chosen point. Each course can easily take about 100 hours, which sounds a lot, but if you do them you can take that knowledge and more easily extrapolate information in the future.







    1. let pyproject.toml track the dependencies and dev-dependencies you actually care about
    • dependencies are what you need to run your application
    • dev-dependencies are not necessary to run your app, but to develop it (formatting, linting, utilities, etc)
    1. it can track exactly what’s needed ot run the application via the uv.lock file that contains each and every lib that’s needed.
    2. uv will install the needed Python version for you, completely separate from what your system is running.
    3. uv sync and uv run <application> is pretty much all you need to get going
    4. it’s blazingly fast in everything

  • pip3 freeze > requirements.txt

    I hate this. Because now I have a list of your dependencies, but also the dependencies of the dependencies, and I now have regular dependencies and dev-dependencies mixed up. If I’m new to Python I would have NO idea which libraries would be the important ones because it’s a jumbled mess.

    I’ve come to love uv (coming from poetry, coming from pip with a requirements/base.txt and requirements/dev.txt - gotta keep regular dependencies and dev-dependencies separate).

    uv sync

    uv run <application>

    That’s it. I don’t even need to install a compatible Python version, as uv takes care of that for me. It’ll automatically create a local .venv/, and it’s blazingly fast.





  • I can’t stand the bloat of virtual environments

    Sucks to be you, but virtual envs are THE way to keep everything running on your own machine. You can try to keep everything in a single venv, but then you’ll start wondering why it doesn’t work on other’s machines.

    built-in tools provided by the language

    sqlite3 module comes with Python. As does the json module. Use pathlib’s Path object over os.whatever because the API is nicer to work with. abc (short for Abstract Base Class - abc, get it?) is useful for inheritance stuff. I like click, but there’s argparse if you need to write a CLI. Stay away from asyncio if you can - it’s usually not faster and a bigger PITA than it needs to be. Need to transport a binary, but you can only send text? base64. import datetime as dt if your new friend when it comes to datetime objects - to be aware to keep things timezone-native. You’ll need pytz for that - Python doesn’t update fast enough to keep up to date with all the new timezone shenanigants. always check for missing timezones; they’ll cap your kneecaps and kick you in the balls if you’re not careful. http can be used to make calls to APIs though requests is a favorite; slap urllib3 and you got yourself a sauce going on! Skip logging and jump to a lib that supports structured logging, python-json-logger is a nice beginner’s log lib, jump to structlog if you need the raw power (say you want control over other people’s logging output). math is a sleeper hit - powers, roots, floors, ceitings, and statistics is a nice addition on top of that together with random for probabilistic stuff. multiprocessing if you need to run something concurrently: ProcessPoolExecutor for IO, ThreadPoolExecutor for CPU bound stuff (IIRC). re for regex related stuff. uuid if you need a unique identifier (this can be slow in DBs, so take care!)

    ecosystem

    PyPI (Python Packaging Index) if your new friend - pai-pee-ai; not paipai - that’s the JIT implementation of Python: pypy.

    Use pytest to run your tests, ruff for formatting (though I imagine it intimidating for beginners, better to bite the bullet (even if you nibble on it slowly), uv to track your dependencies and Python version.

    Yes, figuring out a nice configuration for these tools is a pain, but that’s what ChatGPT is for. Just don’t go too wild on the settings, as there are MANY, and if something doesn’t work because ChatGPT got a little outdated, it’ll hurt.

    Anyway, that’s about 4 years of experience concentrated in a single page. If you ever feel like an imposter: that’s a common feeling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome If it’s hitting you on the head, see if you can talk with your seniors about it (presuming they’re sane adults) - otherwise there’s always Lemmy to vent :P .

    edit: if you need to handle tabular data: Polars. If anyone recommends Pandas over Polars, hit them with a newspaper until they crawl back under the rock they came from. Unless it’s for GeoPandas, then it’s OK.


  • The new king on the block: uv. It can do everything poetry does, while also using a standard pyproject.toml (no more weird ^), and it’ll handle the Python version for you, so no faffing about with manually installing anything. Just uv sync and off you go!

    Downside: not compatible with virtualenvwrapper, as it’ll force its .venv in the local folder.

    It’s also still under heavy development and breaking changes are still expected, but it’s already super nice to use.

    Same guys (Astral) also made ruff the formatter/linter that they intend to eventually integrate into uv, IIRC.

    I’m running all my personal projects under uv and am having a blast. It’s so fast.