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 …

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.

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 …

Here are some tricks to working with log file extracts. We're looking at some Enterprise Splunk extracts. We can fiddle around with Splunk, trying to explore the data. Or we can get a simple extract and fiddle around with the data in Python.

Running different experiments in Python seems to …

See Audio Synth.

At first, I imagined the problem was going to be PyAudio. This package has a bunch of installers. But the installers don't recognize Python 3.4, so none of them work for me. The common fallback plan is to install from source, but, I couldn't find the …