Social media has become a rich source of public data that can provide valuable insights when analyzed. Twitter, with its real-time feed of tweets from millions of users across the globe, is a particularly attractive platform for data analysis. By collecting and analyzing tweet data, we can uncover insights into public sentiment about various topics,…
As a full-stack developer working in the finance industry, I often need to provide user-friendly, up-to-date stock market data to business stakeholders and analysts. Manually updating Excel spreadsheets with the latest stock prices and metrics is tedious and error-prone. In this guide, I‘ll show you how to automate the process of fetching stock data, generating…
As a full-stack developer and professional coder, I‘ve seen firsthand how automated reporting can be a game-changer for data-driven organizations. Reports are essential for uncovering insights, monitoring KPIs, and driving action – but creating them by hand is tedious and error-prone. By leveraging Python to generate reports automatically from a SQL database, you can save…
As a database administrator or developer, one of your most important responsibilities is to regularly back up your SQL databases. Backups protect your valuable data against accidental deletion, corruption, or loss due to hardware failures or other disasters. Without current backups, your organization could suffer catastrophic data loss and extended downtime. While backing up databases…
As a data analyst or developer, you likely spend a significant amount of time working with Microsoft Excel. While Excel is a powerful tool for data manipulation and analysis, many of the tasks involved can be repetitive, time-consuming, and prone to errors. Fortunately, by leveraging the power of Python, you can automate many of these…
As data professionals, we often find ourselves spending countless hours on repetitive data extraction, transformation, and reporting tasks. But what if you could automate the entire process and have updated reports land in your inbox every morning like clockwork? Enter Python – the versatile scripting language that can streamline your data workflows and save you…
If you‘ve worked on a Python project of any significant size, you‘ve probably encountered inconsistently formatted code. Maybe you‘re browsing a file and suddenly the indentation changes from 4 spaces to 2. Or there are seemingly random line breaks and extra spaces that don‘t follow any discernible pattern. In the best case, this inconsistent formatting…
Ellipses are one of the most important shapes in geometry and have wide-ranging real-world applications. From planetary orbits to GPS confidence intervals, ellipses provide a natural way to represent an area around two points or a line. In this post, we‘ll dive deep into the world of ellipses and learn how to draw them in…
Writing complex, branching narratives for live-action roleplaying games (LARPs) is a notoriously difficult task. As the number of characters and plot threads grows, it becomes increasingly challenging for a human author to keep all the details consistent and error-free across hundreds of pages of interlinked documents. This is where techniques from software engineering and knowledge…
As a full-stack Python developer, you‘ve likely encountered *args and *kwargs before. These strange-looking syntaxes are powerful tools that allow functions to accept arbitrary numbers of positional and keyword arguments. Mastering args and **kwargs is essential for writing flexible, reusable code that can adapt to different situations. In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll dive deep into…
As a full-stack developer with years of experience in Python programming, I can confidently say that understanding how to work with lists and arrays is one of the most fundamental skills for any Python coder. Lists are used in nearly every Python application to store, organize, and manipulate collections of data. In this comprehensive guide,…
As a Python developer, you‘ll frequently need to join, combine, or append strings together. For example, you might need to concatenate a first and last name together, or build a complete sentence out of individual words. Luckily, Python provides several convenient ways to append strings. In this article, we‘ll take an in-depth look at using…