software on ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ Dmitry's Internet Website

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 17:50:38 -0800

I recently got to work on making fast Python code. I put together an IPython notebook highlighting some things I learned. Topics include NumPy, Cython, and Numba.

Python Project Structures

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 17:29:37 -0700

Updated on: 2023-07-24.

Python project structures are confusing. Let’s make them less so.

Terminology

First, a few standard Python terminology definitions:

a module is a single Python script,
a package is a collection of modules¹.

A project may be an application or a library:

an application is a program that is meant to be deployed, such as a script for numerical calculations, a server, or a Discord bot,
a library is a package that will be imported by other libraries or applications.

Project Structures

There are a few common, recommended Python project structures². This is the one I prefer:

Unicode, String Encodings, and Python

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 11:20:59 -0700

I’ve been working on the cryptopals challenges and avoiding stock libraries, to learn more about string encodings and the bytes type in Python 3. So here, we’ll learn way more than we need to know about Unicode.

Text as Unicode Strings

To work with text data, computers need to work with many different types of characters. From all the world’s languages to symbols to emojis, the list goes on. Unicode¹ is a specification that aims to give every character used in human texts its own unique and standard code.