Here are 30 Python best practices, tips, and tricks. I’m sure they’ll help you procrastinate your actual work, and still learn something useful in the process.

1. Use Python 3

In case you missed it: Python 2 is officially not supported as of January 1, 2020. This guide has a bunch of examples that only work in Python 3. If you’re still on Python 2.7, upgrade now.

If you’re on MacOS, you can use Homebrew to painlessly upgrade Python.

2. Check for a minimum required Python version

You can check for the Python version in your code, to make sure your users are not running your script with an incompatible version. …

Python virtual environments allow you to install Python packages in an isolated location for a particular application instead of installing them globally.

Let’s explore what the advantages are and how you can quickly get started.

Why You Need Virtual Environments

Preventing version conflicts

If you install third-party packages system-wide, you could argue that you’re very efficient. After all, you only need to install it once, saving you precious time and disk space.

There’s a problem with this approach that may start to unfold weeks or months later, however.

Suppose your project, Project A, is written against a specific version of its dependencies. …

Many developers still use the combination of virtualenv and pip, but most of them probably haven’t heard about pipenv yet. This article introduces pipenv, a better way to manage your Python virtual environments.

Why pipenv?

Using pipenv has several advantages compared to using pip and virtualenv. These are the main ones:

• You no longer need to use pip and virtualenv separately. Instead, you have one tool that does it all — and more!
• pipenv separates your top-level dependencies from the last tested combination (e.g., the output of pip freeze). This makes dependency management more user-friendly for you as a developer.
• pipenv encourages…

The dictionary is one of Python’s most powerful data types. In other programming languages and computer science in general, dictionaries are also known as associative arrays. This is because they allow you to associate keys with values.

Creating a Dictionary

Let’s look at how we can create and use a dictionary in the Python REPL:

>>> phone_nrs = { 'Jack': '070-02222748', 'Pete': '010-2488634' }
>>> an_empty_dict = { }
>>> phone_nrs['Jack']
'070-02222748'

The first dictionary associates keys (names like Jack and Pete) with values (their phone numbers). The second dictionary is an empty one.

Now that you’ve seen how to initialize a dictionary…

1. Create a game

I bet you never considered creating a game with Python. But why not? There are awesome libraries that will help you develop games. So let’s help your kids, your partner, or your colleagues get through this crisis with a fun game!

Pygame

Pygame is a cross-platform set of Python modules designed for writing video games. It includes computer graphics and sound libraries. Here are a few tutorials you can try:

• Making Games with Python & Pygame
• Game development with Pygame
• The official getting started guide (note: as of writing, the site is down, so I linked to a “Wayback machine” version…

Getting started is hard, no matter what subject it is. To prevent getting discouraged early on, I’m sharing these tips to optimize your learning path.

1. Dive into the basics

You’d think the Python website itself would contain a good tutorial like most other languages do. However, they mostly link to other sites or dive in deep, assuming you are a seasoned programmer already.

Python Land offers a free and easy to follow introduction to the language, with topics like:

• Python’s history (the language is actually quite old!)
• Installation instructions
• A beginner's tutorial to Python covering basics like variables, functions, for-loops, etcetera

If you prefer…

Extended periods of sitting increase your risk of chronic health problems, such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. It can also be bad for your mental health.

It’s essential to develop healthy habits as early as you can to counter these risks. I’ll share six crucial tips that helped me improve my health as a software developer.

1. Get Enough Quality Sleep

Sleep is underrated. It’s the foundation of your health. So why do we need it so badly? There are various reasons — these are a few found by scientists:

• All kinds of tasks appear to be more challenging when you’re deprived of sleep.
• …

YAML, a recursive acronym for “YAML Ain’t Markup Language”, is a human-readable data serialization language. It is often used for configuration files, but can also be used for data exchange. The most used python YAML parser is PyYAML, a library that allows you to load, parse, and write YAML, much like Python’s JSON library helps you to work with JSON.

In this article, I’ll share six tricks to effectively and securely use this library. But first, we’ll explore why you should use YAML in the first place.

Why use YAML with Python?

YAML is easy to write and read for humans, while at the same…