Python - Preslav Rachev

A Book on Teaching Elixir to Pythonistas? Will It Fly?

My recent foray into writing and self-publishing a technical book showed me that teaching people what I've learned is what drives me forward. That's especially true for offering the audience a different perspective (like teaching Go developers how to make art with code). Naturally, I started looking for a way

Programming

On-Demand Request Logging in Flask

Not logging enough is as equally bad, as logging too much. What developers need is a turn-key way to log requests on demand.

Programming

Using Ephemeral Docker Containers as CLI Applications

Docker containers have proven themselves extremely useful in allowing developers to sandbox environments and ease the deployment of services. Have a complicated service setup? No worries. Simply, describe the steps in a Dockerfile and you should be able to replicate the process on every host OS that has Docker support.

Programming

Use Dotenv Files When Developing Your Python Apps

Hard-coding configuration is bad. This is one of the things that newbie programmers learn quickly after they realize that have committed sensitive information to a public GitHub repository. And it happens so easily. Often, you are in the spur of the moment, wanting to test something locally, when you figure

Programming

Use Dotenv Files When Developing Your Python Apps

Hard-coding configuration is bad. This is one of the things that newbie programmers learn quickly after they realize that have committed sensitive information to a public GitHub repository. And it happens so easily. Often, you are in the spur of the moment, wanting to test something locally, when you figure

Programming

Dependency Injection in Python: The Java Guy's Perspective

In this post, I will lay out my arguments why you might want to think about dependency injection for your next Python project. I am not trying to preach a certain style of "best-practice" programming, but simply, to share my perspective from the eyes of a seasoned Java developer.

Programming

Designing Well-Structured REST APIs with Flask-RestPlus: Part 1

This is the first part of a two-part series. In this post, I will introduce Flask-RestPlus and demonstrate how to start organising APIs around its simple REST-based conventions. Next time, I will address the topic of request/response marshalling (serialisation) and validation. A seasoned Spring developer, I felt a bit

Programming

Python: Automatic Argument Unpacking from a Dictionary

Programming often involves creating configuration objects/dicts and passing them around to functions. Let's say we want to pass the following configuration dict to a function: config = { 'prop_a': 'foo', 'prop_b': 'bar' } Usually, a function that consumes this configuration dict would either expect a single parameter: def do_something(

Data Science

Data Science on Your iPad

This article is a follow-up transcription to a talk I recently gave at a local Munich machine learning meetup. Unlike my previous talk, this time I wanted to convey the idea of using an iPad for actively running data science experiments, as opposed to passively consuming information. I illustrated my

Algotrading

Introducing My New Pet Project: Should I HODL

My crypto-obsession from last year might have died down a little, but I still remain a long-term investor and a believer of decentralization. Moreover, it was predicting the crypto market's next move that made dust off some of my old machine learning experiments and gave a fresh boost to my

Programming

Live-reloading of Python Modules in the Python REPL / IPython / Jupyter Console

Often, I would work on a Python module and add changes to it live, which I would then want to test immediately. Piece of cake! Add the changes and execute the script again. Well, that’s certainly a way, but as modules get bigger, they tend to import other modules,

Data Science

[Pandas] Finding a Row Where One of Its Values Is at a Minimum/Maximum

Often, we will want to get to get a specific row, which marks the minimum or maximum of one of its columns. Let's suppose we have the SF Salaries dataset from Kaggle. We want to find the employee name, with the largest total pay benefits. The experience with writing NumPy/