Recently I wanted to get all the links in an archive of newsletters. The goal was to have a text file with the links so that I didn’t have to manually go through each newsletter.

This is a real world example so I wanted it to be fast and easy. This is how I actually did it with python.

The best web scraping package for python in BeautifulSoup. And the best package for making url calls is Requests.

pip install beautifulsoup4, requests

I did all the python work in a jupyter notebook. I tend to use jupyter if I am…

Code reviews are one of the most important activities in the daily workings of a software team. They are an opportunity for everyone to become familiar with the codebase. They help prevent siloing (one person becoming the only source of knowledge). And they are a great opportunity for beginning programmers to learn from more experienced programmers.

When I do a python code review, I’m looking for several things.

Here is a list of eight basic things I look for first. …

As a Python developer who is also writing Dart, there are a few things I was missing when developing in Dart. One of those was the mighty zip function. The zip function in Python is really handy for combining two or more lists into a list of lists. (actually python returns an iterator of tuples, but it serves the same purpose) This zipping operation is pretty common in data science when cleaning up data.

After a little digging, I found the zip function in Dart. It’s in a package called Quiver. I’m not sure if it is a core package…

In my day job as a Python developer, I use list comprehensions a lot. Now that I’ve been doing some development in Dart, and more specifically Flutter, I wanted a place to reference the common list comprehension style executions in Dart. So here are a few good ones.

The Map() Method
Let’s start with a simple list of integers:

var int_list = [1, 2, 3, 4];

Python’s:

[x + 1 for x in my_list]

In Dart you would use the map() method like this:

var int_list_plus_1 = int_list.map((x) => x + 1).toList();

Returns [2, 3, 4, 5] The reason that…