Summary: The double asterisk operator has the following uses: a**b – Exponentiation. def f(**kwargs) – Unpacking: Defining an arbitrary number of keyword arguments. f(**d) – Dictionary Unpacking. f(**d1,**d2) – Merging Dictionaries. While using a function in your program, you might be uncertain about the number of named arguments that have to be passed into the … Read more
Freelancing is the new mega trend. And there’s a good reason: more and more companies see the cost benefits of hiring outside expertise by the hour. Much like cloud computing revolutionized the server market, freelancing disrupts the talent market with a pay-as-you go model for businesses. The big benefits for freelance developers are convincing as … Read more
Freelance developing is snowballing—more and more coders decide to “work for themselves” and smash their well-compensated coding jobs in order to earn even higher rates as freelance developers. What are the reasons for the double-digit growth rates of freelancing platforms? Many freelance developers name higher hourly rates, no commute time, no bosses, greater flexibility, more … Read more
What’s the hourly rate of a freelance developer? If you’re like me, you want to peek into the potential of a given profession before you commit years of your life to any profession like freelance developing. The average freelance developer worldwide earns $56 per hour with conservative estimates ranging as low as $31 and aggressive … Read more
Every computer scientist knows the asterisk quantifier of regular expressions. But many non-techies know it, too. Each time you search for a text file *.txt on your computer, you use the asterisk operator. But how does it work? This article is all about the asterisk * quantifier in Python’s re library. Study it carefully and master … Read more
Summary: Passing mutable objects as default arguments leads to unexpected outputs because Python initializes the default mutable object only once, not (as you may have expected) each time the function is called. To fix this, initialize the mutable default argument with the None keyword in the argument list and then initialize it within the function. … Read more
Problem: How to estimate the price of a given code project as a freelancer and as a client? Estimating the price of a freelance software project is a common problem for both freelance developers and clients. On freelancing platforms such as Upwork, clients must associate a realistic price to their freelance project. On freelancing platforms … Read more
Many beginners who just start out with object-oriented programming in Python are confused about the purpose of the keyword “self”. Let’s resolve this confusion once and for all! The name self is, by convention, the name of the first argument of a Python class method. The variable self points to the concrete instance on which … Read more
According to Python’s founder Guido van Rossum, Python provides “Computer Programming for Everybody”. Coders love Python for several reasons. Its smooth learning curve, readability, comprehensibility of the Python Standard Library, and fantastic 3rd party frameworks. Data science (manipulation and visualization), (Web) Scraping, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Game Development, Web Development are some of the wide … Read more
Summary: Slicing is a Python concept to extract a subsequence from a string or list—that lies within a start and stop index range. There are two syntactical ways to define a slice. (1) The extended slice notation makes use of a colon : in string_name[start:stop:step]. (2) The slice() constructor defines the index range in string_name[slice(start:stop:step)]. … Read more
COVID-19 has changed the world in a sustainable way. Suddenly, even the most conservative bosses realized that it is perfectly efficient to allow developers to work from home. Remote work may easily be one of the most transformative trends in the 21st century: It will have an impact on almost every conventional job under the … Read more
Summary: Variables are passed by object reference in Python. Therefore, mutable objects are passed by reference while immutable objects are passed by value in Python. To pass immutable objects by reference you can return and reassign the value to the variable, or pass it inside a dictionary/list, or create a class and use the self … Read more