Posts in English
pandas Groupby: split-?-combine
- 21 September 2022
- English
When choosing what groupby operations to run, pandas offers many options. Namely, you can choose to use one of these three:
agg or aggregate
pandas Groupby: split-?-combine
- 21 September 2022
- English
When choosing what groupby operations to run, pandas offers many options. Namely, you can choose to use one of these three:
agg or aggregate
Unconventional Pandas: Colormaps
- 14 September 2022
- English
Hello everyone! We have some exciting events coming up, including a NEW seminar series and a code review workshop series. In our brand new seminar series, we will share with you some of the hardest problems we have had to solve in pandas and NumPy (and, in our bonus session on September 16th, hard problems that we have had to solve in Matplotlib!). Then, next month starting October 12th, we will be holding our first ever “No Tears Code Review,” where we’ll take attendees througha a code review that will actually help them gain insight into their code and cause meaningful improvements to their approach.
Let’s get to the exciting content!
President Rankings - a pandas challenge
- 08 September 2022
- English
Welcome back to another edition of Cameron’s Corner! We have some exciting events coming up, including a NEW seminar series and a code review workshop series. In our brand new seminar series, we will share with you some of the hardest problems we have had to solve in pandas and NumPy (and, in our bonus session, hard problems that we have had to solve in Matplotlib!). Then, next month starting October 12th, we will be holding our first ever “No Tears Code Review,” where we’ll take attendees througha a code review that will actually help them gain insight into their code and cause meaningful improvements to their approach.
I recently received a question about webscraping and pandas and wanted to share with you an example I had come across. As with most code I run into online, I thought to myself, “What I would change if I wrote this from scratch.”
Estimating The Standard Deviation of a Population from a Sample
- 31 August 2022
- English
Welcome back to another edition of Cameron’s Corner! We have some exciting events coming up, including a NEW seminar series and a code review workshop series. In our brand new seminar series, we will share with you some of the hardest problems we have had to solve in pandas and NumPy (and, in our bonus session, hard problems that we have had to solve in Matplotlib!). Then, next month starting October 12th, we will be holding our first ever “No Tears Code Review,” where we’ll take attendees througha a code review that will actually help them gain insight into their code and cause meaningful improvements to their approach.
For Cameron’s Corner this week, I wanted to take some time to talk about another statistical visualization I’m working on that covers Bessel’s Correction. Ready for some advanced matplotlib with a sprinkle of statistics? Let’s dive in!
Quordle: Strategies
- 03 August 2022
- English
Following up from last week where I worked on adapting the Wordle game engine to also play Quordle. I wanted to take some time to see if we can play Quordle smarter. To do this, I wanted to design a few “cross-board strategies” to play Quordle with. When playing 4 simultaneous Wordle boards where each guess you make is applied to all boards, there is an important decision to make: which board to I focus my attention on for any given turn? Do I attempt to solve one board entirely before attempting to guess another? Do I sequentially rotate amongst these boards each turn? These are examples of what I mean by a “cross board strategy”
To get started, let’s port over all of the Quordle Engine code from last weeks post, and check to see that it still works.
Quordle: Engine
- 27 July 2022
- English
This week I wanted to revisit a fun project. Specifically, I wanted to try extending the code I wrote to play Wordle to see if I can get it to also play Quordle. For those of who are unfamiliar, Quordle is a similar word game to Wordle in that you guess 1 word per round to try and solve a puzzle. After each round you are provided with feedback per each letter with whether or not the letter appears in the word, appears in the word and is in the correct position, or does not appear in each word. Quordle takes this idea and adds another challenge: you must play 4 simultaneous games of Wordle.
When playing simultaneous games, you must use the same guess across all Wordle boards. For each round, you are provided with the same feedback and if you guess correctly you are finished with that specific board. This extension opens up for new and interesting strategies (which boards do I solve first, how do I go about picking good candidate words) as well as interesting models & maintenance of game state and display.
Pandas: SettingWithCopyWarning
- 29 June 2022
- English
Wrapping up June already?! I can’t believe how quickly things are moving.
I wanted to take some time today to discuss one of the most common issues facing pandas users: SettingWithCopyWarning
Combinatorics in Matplotlib
- 22 June 2022
- English
Happy Wednesday everybody! This past week, I held a seminar on Logic as part of our series on “The Computer Science You Never Took in College”. We covered many topics around logic- including binary logic and operations, set operations, propositional logic, and combinatorics!
Today I would like to discuss the latter topic while also breaking down a fun
matplotlib-based example I used to highlight the different combinatoric
functions we have available to us in Pythons standard library itertools.
NumPy - Views vs Copies
- 08 June 2022
- English
Hey everyone! I can’t believe we’re half way through the year already. We have been extremely busy working on seminars for the rest of the year, as well as putting together some special events for our VIPs and alumni network.
We held VIP session at the end of last month wherein we challenged James to live-code the game of UNO from scratch. While UNO ended up being a much more complex game than any of us originally anticipated, James was able to accurately recreate the game, and he shared many helpful tips-and-tricks along the way.
Wordle From Scratch
- 01 June 2022
- English
This past week I led a live-coding seminar where I built and reviewed the popular word game Wordle from scratch. This was a fun live-coding project where I iterated on a few key components of the game. To start things off, we drafted all of the components needed to recreate Wordle:
An unknown word
Decorators: Reinventing the Wheel
- 28 May 2022
- English
Hey everyone, welcome to another week of Camerons Corner! This is going to be my last post on decorators for a little while, so I wanted to take some time and expand on what packages you might see generators in and how I would implement them if I had to from scratch. In this post, I’m going to reinvent the wheel- that is you’ll see code I’ve written to replicate popular decorators from many third party packages. I am aiming to replicate only the core functionality of these decorator patterns in order to better highlight that these mechanisms are not something magical. There is real code underlying these patterns that enable unique design patterns.
When writing these examples, I only looked at various documentation pages & examples that use these decorators. No source code was examined or copied.
Python: Advanced Decorators
- 21 May 2022
- English
In a previous post, I shared a primer on how to approach the thinking of decorators and when we can apply them in our code. To summarize, we primarily see 3 entry points where decorators can dynamically effect our code:
entry point
Python: Decorator Fundamentals
- 14 May 2022
- English
Python has had the standard @decorator style decorator syntax since PEP 318 – Decorators for Functions and Methods was accepted, while some tweaks to the grammar have been made a long the way via PEP 3129 – Class Decorators and PEP 614 – Relaxing Grammar Restrictions On Decorators, their behavior has remained largely unchanged.
The most common misconception about decorators is that they are a function that takes a function and returns a function. While this does describe a common pattern for decorators, it ignores their generalized framework and misses strong usecases for decorators. Instead, I will say that a decorator is a callable that takes a class or function as an argument to encapsulate/manipulate some state and/or prepend/append some behavior to that class or function. While that definition is quite verbose, I think the following code snippets will help make my point.
Structured Objects: namedtuple
- 04 May 2022
- English
In one of our recent classes, the topic of structured objects came up. While discussing the tuple as an object that is typically used to model entities or tie together features of a single entity. In our discussion we compared the built-in tuple and namedtuple to assess the uses of either and see how we can improve the intent of our code using the namedtuple to model single entities.
Before we go too deep into the
Pandas - What Else Can You .groupby?
- 02 March 2022
- English
Hey there! Welcome to the first DUTC newsletter of March 2022! We have had an action packed start to the year and are eager to keep the trainings coming. Next month, in March, we are unveiling a new lineup of weekly seminars titled: Confident Queries & Stronger SQL. Where we will help to not only refine your SQL skills, but also but also convey the underlying framework and mental models that power the most commonly used database querying language in the world. And if that isn’t enough to get excited about, then you should be excited for my next presentation where I’ll be comparing Pandas vs SQL to address the similarities and differences between these tools. What types of analyses are possible with either tool, how often do they overlap, and when they do- which one should I use? All of these questions and more will be answered this March! So make sure you register now for our SQL seminar series.
Not only do we have SQL sessions upcoming, but we also have an upcoming Developing Expertise in Python and pandas course this April 18-21! Our developing expertise courses are easily my favorite content we offer. The ability to sit down in a small group and address problems in a paired-programming environment provides the most impactful form of learning. Not only do you get to ask any question about syntax, concepts, and approaches- but you can do so in a safe environment while learning best practices within the PyData stack. If you want to bridge the gap from an intermediate Python programmer to become an expert Pythonista (RUN THIS TERMINOLOGY BY JAMES), then I can not recommend this course enough. We work tirelessly to create a balanced and custom curriculum to meet the goals of all of our attendees.