In January I wrote that I want to make a big and interesting project with Codingame - develop an ML-based bot for LEGENDS OF CODE & MAGIC. Procrastinating an attempt to do it (again...) I found out that there is something really interesting on Codingame. Clash of Code! It is a tiny coding competition. After playing them for a while I can say they are awesome to relax from daily routine.
There is a wonderful feature in Python import statement to make an alias for an imported object (import foo.bar.baz as fbb). It allows to avoid name conflicts and improve code readability if necessary. And of course, using it you can easily turn your perfect code into a completely unreadable mess. Recently I’ve seen this several times. I’ve met some strange abbreviations and confusing aliases.
I don’t like else if there is return-statement in both branches. It is always possible to write code without that unnecessary if appendage. Such code looks more accurate, more clear and it is easier to read. Why so many developers still use this useless else?
Posted on Wed, 02 Jan 2019 in Other • Tagged with blog, plans, 2019
Today is 2nd of January 2019. It is a time to make some plans for this blog. I want to write at least 12 blog posts. There are two topics that I find very interesting: CodinGames and Kaggle challenges.
Posted on Thu, 25 Oct 2018 in Python • Tagged with python, kivy, mobile
There are several GUI frameworks for Python. Most of them are for desktop applications. Kivy is an exception. Using it you can build project for mobile platforms. Unfortunately, it is not production ready. You have to juggle versions of libraries to make it works. So even having a t-shirt that says print("Python is my favorite language") I have to accept that Python is not for mobile development.
Posted on Mon, 27 Aug 2018 in Python • Tagged with python, type hints
Type hints are not mandatory in Python. So you can use them or not. If you decide work with them you’ll face many difficulties annotating functions or variables. This article shows my point of view on one specific case.
Posted on Thu, 12 Jul 2018 in Other • Tagged with python, c++
The latest couple of months I've spent around 40 hours at weekends and in evenings trying to write a bot that is able to finish the track of Coders Strike Back faster than opponents. During this time I'd made quite a lot of mistakes before I got into the Legendary league. This is a post-mortem for that project.
Posted on Thu, 29 Mar 2018 in Python • Tagged with python, python internals, cpython
Maybe, knowing Python internals is not a thing you should know to be a good Python developer. However, if you want to improve your code it becomes more important. If you know it works under the hood, you write a code with less stupid mistakes and architecture issues.
Are you looking for a simple thin Computer Science book? Maybe, Computer Science Distilled is for you. Unfortunately only if you have no plans to code for living. In this case, it is a good introduction to computer science world. If you are professional developer or CS student, skip this book.
Posted on Mon, 29 Jan 2018 in Python • Tagged with typing, mypy, python
Type hints could help you a lot with a big Python project. However, they sometimes require code refactoring. I wrote about it last year in this article, but I have found a good example for this only now.