Published in Geek Culture·3 days agoMember-onlyHow is NumPy so damn fast?Short answer, it’s written in C, longer answer… When we talk about the efficiency of NumPy arrays (np arrays), what exactly do we mean? There are two separate issues: Efficiency of memory usage. Processing efficiency. Why are NumPy arrays more efficient than Python lists? The basic reason NumPy is more efficient is that it is written in C rather…Python7 min read
Published in Geek Culture·6 days agoMember-onlyPong game using Pygame — step 1First in a series of pygame articles This is the first article in a series where we will develop a complete game of Pong using Pygame. In this step, we will simply create a window and display the bat and ball, with no animation. The code for this article can…Python8 min read
Published in Geek Culture·Sep 19Member-onlyLooping over two lists with zipA Pythonistic technique to avoid loop counters We sometimes need to loop over two different sequences at the same time. For example, if we had two lists: colors = ["red", "green", "blue"] shapes = ["circle", "square", "triangle"] and we wanted to print these lists side by side: red circle green square blue…Python5 min read
Published in Geek Culture·Sep 18Member-onlyDitch loop counters, use this insteadWrite more pythonic code with enumerate Even though it is often best to avoid loop counters, there are times when they can be useful. Fortunately, you don’t have to forget everything you have learnt so far — you can use the enumerate function. …Python4 min read
Published in Geek Culture·Aug 30Member-onlyRendering Latex formulas in PythonIt’s easy with generativepy. In this article we will look at the simplest way to render a Latex formula as a PNG image using generativepy. We will use the rasterise_formula function of the formula module. First, we will look at how a formula is defined. Latex Latex provides a way to…Latex3 min read
Published in Geek Culture·Aug 29Member-onlyIs Google Keep good enough?It all depends on what you need. Alongside the three productivity tools I mainly use, I sometimes find it useful to have a simple, visual dashboard of what projects I currently have active. This helps me ensure that I spend a bit of time on each active project every so…Productivity5 min read
Published in Geek Culture·Aug 22Member-onlyPermutations in PythonUsing the itertools module The itertools.permutations function accepts a single iterable and creates every possible permutation of input values. What are permutations If we have a set of distinct values, for example the set of letters A, B, C, and D, there are different ways we can arrange those items. For example ABCD…Python6 min read
Published in Geek Culture·Aug 19Member-onlyCartesian products in PythonMade easy with itertools The itertools.product function returns the Cartesian product of two or more iterables. What is the Cartesian product? Suppose we have two sets of values, for example: a is the set of values (1, 2, 3). b is the set of values ("a", "b", "c", "d"). Suppose we form a pair of…Python6 min read
Published in Geek Culture·Aug 5Member-onlyKeyword SEO on a BudgetOptimise100 articles for $10 Up until recently, I have tended to ignore SEO. But I’ve finally decided to bite the bullet and give it a try. What is SEO? Almost anyone with a website probably wants to attract as many viewers as possible. …SEO8 min read
Published in Geek Culture·Jul 24Member-onlyUsing Optionals in PythonSay ‘non’ to None. There are often situations in code where a required value doesn’t exist. A typical way of dealing with this is to return None but optionals provide a cleaner way, and the optional.py module provides an easy-to-use implementation of optionals. An example For example, suppose we had a customer…Python6 min read
