Many years ago ('07?) I went to my first PyCon. My situation changed and I didn't get to another PyCon until last year.

The story is a kind of major dumbosity. In '07 I could expense the trip as education. In '08, I'd lost that feature of my employment. After …

I have to be clear that I am obsessed with the str.format() family of functions. I've happily left the string % operator behind. I recently re-discovered the vars() function.

My current go-to technique for providing debugging information is this:

print( "note: local={local!r}, this={this!r}, that={that!r …

An Open Letter from the Nation’s Tech and Business Leaders: Why Computer Science for All is good for all. "These are the skills and competencies that will power the growth of every industry..." Civic leaders and educators need to be in on this. And professionals who have skills to …

Wunderbar. A whole bunch of nicely integrated data collection modules. I prefer to hack around with Arduino. I'm not sure why -- perhaps it's the lure of building approximately from scratch. But this is very cool. No soldering. Just start gathering data. I have a half-built Arduino-based device to measure the …

I'm starting to get chapters back from the technical reviewers. This is an important part of the writing process: correcting my mistakes and clarifying things that confused the reviewers.

Packt has had a uniformly excellent cadre of technical reviewers. At this point, I've worked with something like a dozen people …

This just in...

Here's a link to the actual Python Week page, with all the deals there for the week: https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/pythonweek

They also have a week of free Python books too, which change daily: https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning/

Feel free to …

Go to https://www.packtpub.com. Look for the deal of the week. Get 20% off Python titles. You're welcome.

Once upon a time, when today's old folks were young, we'd debate the two project strategies: Hard Part Do Later (HPDL) vs. Hard Part First (HPF).

The HPDL folks argued that you could pick away at the hard part until -- eventually -- it wasn't hard any more. This doesn't often work …

Start here: https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.5.html#whatsnew-pep-484

While new syntax is important, remember your audience in pitching the upgrade from Python 2.7. You may need to pander to people who aren't programmers or don't really know Python.

When selling the upgrade, it can help …