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16 March 2021

Accessing Python package index JSON APIs with requests

PyPI, the Python package index, provides a JSON API for information about its packages. This is essentially a machine-readable source of the same kind of data you can access while browsing the website. For example, as a human, I can head to the numpy project page in my browser, click around and see which versions […]

9 March 2021

The IPython shell and Jupyter notebooks

The Jupyter project started out as IPython and the IPython Notebook. It was originally a Python-specific interactive shell and notebook environment which later branched out to become language-agnostic, supporting Julia, Python and R – and potentially anything else. IPython is a Python shell – similar to what you get when you type python or python3 […]

2 February 2021

virtualenvwrapper

For some time, Python has had support for managing virtual environments. Python 3.3 even added the built-in module venv for creating environments without third-party libraries. There are a number of different tools Python programmers use to manage their environments and the one I use is called virtualenvwrapper. Virtual environments are a way of separating your […]