A crash course in using Python and Mastodon’s API to build bots, analyze data, authorize users, respond to notifications and much more — With what’s happening in Twitter, many people are considering moving to Mastodon. Like Twitter, Mastodon also has an API that can be used to create many useful application, bots, to analyze data, respond to notification or simply post some statuses. In this article we will explore all the things Mastodon…

Kubernetes v1.25 has introduced Container Checkpointing API — Here’s how you can use it for container backup and restore or forensic analysis — Kubernetes v1.25 introduced Container Checkpointing API as an alpha feature. This provides a way to backup and restore Pod containers — without ever stopping them. This feature is primarily aimed at forensic analysis, but general and restore is something any Kubernetes user can take advantage of.

A crash course in using Python and Google APIs to automate all the things you do with Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, or any other Google API — Google has literally hundreds of APIs, including ones for Gmail, Drive, Maps, Translation, Analytics and more. All of these share the same concepts like authorization, pagination or media uploads/downloads. In this article we will explore all of these concepts and also get our hands dirty with some of the above-mentioned…

Start webserver, open browser, parse JSON, compress files and much more with Python commandline tools and without opening a single file or writing any code — Out-of-the-box, Python standard library ships with many great libraries some of which provide commandline interface (CLI), allowing us to do many cool things directly from terminal without needing to even open a .py file. This includes things like starting a webserver, opening a browser, parsing JSON files, benchmarking programs and…

Tips and tricks for inspecting Python objects and getting information about your code at runtime — Python provides a lot of ways to ask questions about your code. Whether it’s basic things like help() function, builtin functions like dir() or more advanced methods in inspect module — the tools are there to help you find the answers to your questions. Let’s find out what kinds of…

A behind-the-scenes look into this well-known argument — Every Python developer is familiar with the self argument, which is present in every* method declaration of every class. We all know how to use it, but do you really know what it is, why it's there, and how it works under the hood? What We Already Know Let’s start with what we already…

Write better list comprehensions with the help of these unknown features and tricks — Python’s list comprehensions (and generators) are an awesome feature that can greatly simplify your code. Most of the time, however, we only use them to write a single for loop, maybe with the addition of one if conditional, and that's it. If you start poking around a bit though, you…

Python’s controversial assignment expression — known as the walrus operator — can improve your code, and it’s time you start using it! — The assignment operator — or walrus operator as we all know it — is a feature that’s been in Python for a while now (since 3.8), yet it’s still somewhat controversial, and many people have unfounded hate for it. In this article, I will try to convince you that the…

Python’s match/case syntax looks like a basic switch statement, but it’s much more powerful than that. — If you’re a Python developer, then you’re probably aware that match/case statement got introduced to the language in 3.10. But even though it looks like basic switch statement which we all know from other languages - in Python - it's much more than just an alternative if syntax. In this…