Python News Roundup – 5/1

It’s been a busy last couple of days in Python land. Recipes, articles and APIs… oh, my.

Python

News

• PyDev has successfully reached its basic crowd-funding goal!

Tutorials, Tools and Articles

• Need help managing various virtualenvs for different projects? Take a look at virtualenvwrapper.
• Here’s a really cool recipe to create a temporary email inbox with lots of messages. It’s great for testing in any application that is made to interact with email.
• The Neckbeard Republic released a new video explaining dunder functions (functions beginning and ending with “__”). Apart from learning what they are for the video teaches some useful tips you can take advantage of.
• The Republic also released a shorter video in response to a thread on /r/python, this one on using super() and method resolution order.
• One way to build a following on Twitter is to Favorite Tweets on mass with fav.py. The script lets you specify a searchterm and quantity and starts looking for matching tweets, it even looks for Tweeters you’re not already following and who have a ratio of more followers to following. Even if you don’t use it for the purpose of building your Twitter base it’s a good example of creative use of the Twitter API.
• Create some awesome, detailed map visualizations quickly in just a few lines of Python with Vincent.
• LISYNP posted a brief explanation of yield and generators.
• This is an informative post which runs through five projects written specifically to compare five different frameworks/technologies, including Lua, Emacs, Go, Flask, and Erlang.
• If you’re a glutton for punishment and would like to extend your suffering to your mobile device, this post compares ten Python tablet editors on iOS and Android.

General Programming

News

• ProgrammableWeb has hit 466 mapping APIs used in 2,454 mashups. This article breaks down everything from data formats to protocols to tags. If you need any kind of geographic data it’s worth taking a look at the full list as they can be quite specialized, you can drill all the way down to real estate listing in Omaha.

Tutorials, Tools and Articles

• A good career discussion piece over at Coding Horror, aptly titled, “So You Don’t Want to be a Programmer After All.”