Articles in the Programming Category

How to use Rust’s clap library to implement boolean --foo and --no-foo flags that undo each other

Python introduced asynchronous programming capabilities in version 3.4 in 2014, with further notable improvements in almost every minor version since. However, to many Python programmers, this area of the language remains esoteric, misunderstood, and underutilized. This article aims to elucidate the fundamental concepts of asynchronous programming as part of the first step towards mastery.

How to create an enum in Python where each member has a “main” value and a set of “extra” constant attributes

When testing Python code with pytest, you may occasionally write tests that you only want to run under special circumstances, such as long-running tests that should only be run under continuous integration and not when invoking pytest locally. The naïve way to accomplish this is to decorate the tests in question with a pytest mark like @pytest.mark.slow and then specify -m "not slow" when running pytest locally, but then you have to remember to pass this option every time, and if you hardcode it into your tox.ini or pytest configuration, you’ll need something else to remove it when testing under CI. Fortunately, there are better ways to make pytest skip tests by default.

Notable features introduced in each major release of Python, from Python 3.0 forwards

auto by Intuit lets you set up automatic creation of tags & releases and population of changelogs in a GitHub project. It takes care of determining the version number for new releases, but, by default, it does not set the new version number in your code. This isn’t a problem if your project uses something like setuptools_scm or versioneer to fetch the version number from Git, but if your project’s version number is hardcoded in your code, you’ll need another solution. bump2version is that solution, and it can be integrated into auto as shown here.

When creating a Python project, you may want to include a number of non-Python files in the project that the code can then access at runtime, such as templates, images, and data. These files are called package data, and this article describes how to include them in & access them from your project.

Let’s say you’ve set up auto for your project via a GitHub Actions workflow, and now you want that workflow to carry out additional steps — such as building & uploading assets — whenever auto creates a new release. Let’s also say that none of the available plugins for auto covers your use-case and you’re not a JavaScript programmer, so you won’t be writing a new plugin to do what you want. How do you adjust your GitHub Actions workflow to run these extra steps at the right time? Read to find out.

An overview of common mistakes made in creating & building a Python package and how to avoid them

How to set up a Click program to read default option values from a config file