Python

REST APIs have become a common way to establish an interface between web back-ends and front-ends, and between different web services. The simplicity of this kind of interface, and the ubiquitous support of the HTTP and HTTPS protocols across different networks and frameworks, makes it an easy choice when considering interoperability issues. Bottle is a minimalist Python web framework. It is lightweight, fast, and easy to use, and is well-suited to building RESTful services. In this article, I'll provide a walkthrough of how to build a RESTful API service using Bottle.

It's no surprise that more and more people, from all kinds of backgrounds, are deciding to learn to code. But, each person who tackles the task is soon faced with an unpleasant reality: Learning to program is hard. Contrary to expectations, the feeling of "I don't get it," may persist unabated long into the journey, making once bright-eyed beginners feel hopeless, lost, and ready to give up. The moral of the story is this: Be prepared. The path to programmer paradise is a long one, and without the right mindset at the beginning, it can quickly lose its appeal. In this article, I'll attempt to give you some guidance on what to expect on your journey, how best to go about it, and what tools and resources you may find helpful along the way.

Analysts have come to recognize social network data as a virtual treasure trove of information for sensing public opinion trends and groundswells of support. In this article, Toptal Engineer Elder Santos describes the techniques he employed for a proof-of-concept that effectively analyzed Twitter Trend Topics to predict, as a sample test case, regional voting patterns in the 2014 Brazilian presidential election.

Although the most wide-spread and supported way of running Django is on a Linux system (e.g., with uwsgi and nginx), it actually doesn't take much work to get it to run on IIS. In this article, Toptal Engineer Ivan Voras walks you through a step-by-step tutorial, clearly explaining how to install Django on IIS.

Reverse engineering and hacking are usually related to malicious activities that result in sleepless nights of engineers responsible for system maintenance. Reverse engineering is a tool that we can utilize to find the flaws and improve our software in many aspects. This article shows us how to use these techniques to learn more about different implementations of web API.

Scientific computing is hard. But thanks to an ever-growing landscape of open source tools, really tough problems are becoming easier to solve. Toptal engineer Charles Cook provides an in-depth example, leveraging open source tools to solve a problem in computational fluid dynamics.

Python's simple, easy-to-learn syntax can mislead Python developers -- especially those who are newer to the language -- into missing some of its subtleties and underestimating the power of the language. In this article, Toptal's Martin Chikilian presents a "top 10" list of somewhat subtle, harder-to-catch mistakes that can trip up even the most advanced Python developer.

This post explores some of the more common types of GPS tracking errors to expect with low-end GPS devices, providing an understanding of what causes them as well as some approaches for correcting them. The techniques outlined can provide users of low-end GPS devices with a reasonable level of automated improvement of the accuracy of their GPS tracks.

I love and use Django in lots of my personal and client projects, mostly for those involving relational databases and more classical web applications. However, by design, Django is very tightly coupled with its ORM, Template Engine System, and Settings object. Plus, it's not a new project: it carries a lot of baggage from the past to remain backwards compatible. In a few of my client projects, we've chosen to give up on Django and use a micro framework like Flask, typically when the client wants to do some interesting stuff with the framework. At the same time, we often need user registration, login, and more, all of which is easily handled with Django. The question emerged: is Django an all-or-nothing deal? Should we drop it completely from the project, or is there a way to combine some it with the flexibility of other frameworks?