Integrating SMS with Twilio
Let’s say that you need to integrate SMS capabilities into your project, and let’s also say that you’re using python. You can use Twilio to very easily integrate texts directly into your application. Setting Up Twilio First though, you’ll need a Twilio account. Go to their signup page, and create …
The Python Typing Module
The typing module added in Python 3.5 (see reference docs here) adds additional types and meta-types to allow for more control over python type hints. In this post we’ll talk about what this module adds and what neat things you can do with it. This is the third post in …
Python Type Hinting
In Python 3.5 and greater an “optional type hinting syntax” was added. This is part of a gradual typing implementation (gradual typing is essentially adding a few types to an untyped codebase, or only partially typing the codebase as you go). This is the second post in a multi-part series …
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Tuple Unpacking
Python has this neat feature of unpacking tuples during item assignment. Here’s a general example:
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1 2 3 |
a, b, c = (a, b, c) |
or if you have a function that returns multiple items:
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1 2 3 |
a, b, c = foo() |
But what if (for some reason) you have a function that returns some large number of variables (or a smaller number of long-named …
An Introduction to Python’s Types
In this post we’ll talk about python’s types, how to use them, how they’re treated, and what we can do with typing. This is aimed at beginners who have heard the words “Python” and “Types” but haven’t quite nailed down what they have to do with each other. This is …
A quick guide to os.fork in Python
Paralellization usually is pretty tricky in python, however there’s a super easy way to implement pretty straightforward parallelization using the built-in os.fork() functionality. Let’s talk about what os.fork() actually does. In short, it simply creates an additional copy (referred to as the “child process”) of the running program at the …
Solving Political Boundaries Through Simulation
In this writeup we’ll discuss two algorithms, simulated annealing and genetic algorithms, and show how they can be applied to the problem of drawing political boundaries while avoiding gerrymandering. This writeup is available on GitHub, or my personal website. Slides for this post are also available here Table of Contents …