I have been writing Python code professionally at Uniregistry for over five years now. It has also been my primary language for projects and algorithm challenges since early in University (2008).
At Uniregistry, we use a custom web framework based on Pyramid and SQLAlchemy. It doesn't come with Django's vast package/app ecosystem, but SQLAlchemy is a very powerful ORM, and I enjoy the query syntax & fine-grained control we have over relationship loading.
I've also recently created a small Django REST Framework service using Python 3.7 and am loving the improvements. (Type annotations are excellent inline documentation, and I was happy to discover that dictionaries and sets now maintain the order of insertion.)
I first started using Python in my second year of university when I taught myself Python & Django for a team project. I chose Django for the excellent documentation, and it taught me a lot about building complete server-side web stacks. Django's source code is also an excellent introduction to Web Application Security / OWASP Top Ten.
I also used Django in 2010 when I worked for a startup. I replaced much PHP with simpler Python code and used Django to spin up a pretty admin interface with more custom functionality than phpMyAdmin.
I pick up a lot of new tools/ideas from the following podcasts.
The following are my favourite tools I've been collecting over the last couple of years. These bullet points might turn into blog posts someday.
IPython
I've been using IPython for a while to test things in a REPL quickly. It's excellent at autocompleting everything on the PYTHONPATH and a fantastic way to explore docs.
I've also customised our Pyramid shell to provide shortcuts to our DAOs and all commonly used backend tasks/manager objects, making it an incredibly powerful production OPS shell. (Careful here: "with great power, etc." 😉)
sentry
We host a private instance of https://sentry.io's error monitoring system, and I've written the code to annotate exceptions/errors with user information and additional information about the originating web route/backend task. It saves us all hours of debugging work every week.
Jupyter notebooks
I've used Jupyter notebooks when they were still IPython notebooks to document some parts of our code base for myself at work. Recently I've used them even more heavily when I took the deeplearning.ai course. I'm still learning the ins and outs of pandas and Matplotlib, but I'm a big fan of their notebook integration.
devpi-server
If you install many packages or need to experiment with many different virtualenvs running devpi-server on localhost saves incredible amounts of time and data. (Looking at you pipenv lock 😒)
pytest
Our test suite currently contains ~8000 unit/integration tests, which massively increases our confidence in each deployment. Tips:
pytest --durations discovers the slowest tests. Sometimes you can massively speed up everyone's test runs by fixing a couple of outliers.pytest-testmon is incredible if you can get it to work reliably. It reverses test coverage to find all tests that could be influenced by changed code and runs only the relevant subset of the suite.pipsi or pipx
Python finally has an npx equivalent to simplify installing Python tools in separate virtualenvs (to avoid conflicting dependencies).
asdf
asdf acts as a universal "tool version manager", much like pyenv/nvm/countless others. I first used it to switch Elixir versions; now it's also my primary tool to manage Python versions.
I'd love to learn about more Tips & Tricks in Python-land. If you feel like I'm missing something super obvious or just want to chat Python, please feel free to contact me.