Adam McKay

As almost every single project I've worked on has used Git for version control I've come to quickly realise just how powerful - and confusing - it can be. Recently at work a bug was found which was not present in the previous release, our test suite didn't detect the issue and we weren't aware of any changes that could have broken that functionality. [Read More]

Python has a “batteries included” philosophy as demonstrated with its extensive standard library and included modules. One part of the standard library that I use very often are iterators, or more specifically, lists. Here I’m going to explain a bit about lists in Python and why they’re awesome. [Read More]

I’m a big fan of the O’Reilly Cookbook series as useful reference material covering hundreds of ready-to-use copy-and-paste examples to solve problems. So I’m following in their footsteps in writing tried and tested “recipes” that I’ve found useful and/or often use. [Read More]

Python has a number of ways to format strings including the plain old string concatenation with +, the % operator and the .format() method. Here I'm going to demonstrate the power of the .format() method with some examples. [Read More]

Python is a language obsessed with readability, with it’s English-like syntax often making it possible to read lines of code as grammatical sentences. It’s, therefore, reasonable for beginners to use the 'is' operator for conditionals instead of '==', however this is rarely the correct behaviour. [Read More]