February 2024: Effectively Manipulating Lists of Objects in Python
Plus, some very cool podcast interviews with key members of the React community and the serverless community.
Hey there,
My last newsletter was a bit lighter on web development content than usual, but even though this month is the shortest of the year, it’s chock full of good links that should more than make up for it.
If podcasts are your jam, you can take your pick of some really interesting discussions around React and building async apps in today’s world, or if reading articles is your preferred method, I can offer blogs on working with lists in Python and using GitHub PR templates to streamline the pull request process within your dev team.
Let’s get to sharing.
Back in August of 2023, I started the web dev podcast Front-end Fire with two of my friends, and this month Rachel Nabors, Matt Carroll, and Evan Bacon joined us to talk about “The Two Reacts”.
There have been a lot of changes in the past year or so to React - the most popular JavaScript framework out today.
Between React Server Components, new React docs, and key members leaving the core engineering team, there’s been a lot of apprehension and confusion among devs about where React is headed.
So Rachel Nabors (who created the react.dev docs site), Evan Bacon (engineering manager at Expo), and Matt Carroll (dev advocate for React at Meta), came on our show to talk about just that. They addressed the challenges React has faced, the disruption RSCs have caused since their release, and why the future for React this year is so bright.
If you want to hear where React is headed, and get excited about what the future holds, give it a listen.
Allen Helton shared why we should stop building synchronous apps on the PodRocket podcast.
I had the good fortune to also interview AWS Serverless Hero and Ecosystem Engineer at Momento, Allen Helton, about why developers need to stop building synchronous apps, and how they can start using asynchronous solutions in their code more often.
It was fascinating to learn from Allen how small changes to the user experience can result in websites “feeling” faster to users and keep them engaged for longer.
His descriptions using WhatsApp as an example were great!
I would highly recommend this episode if you want a better understanding of how more interactivity in the browser sooner can dramatically increase user satisfaction even though longer running processes may still be happening silently in the background.
If you like coding in Python, you’ll probably like this blog I wrote about how to filter, merge, and update Python lists based on object attributes.
Continuing my blog series on building a website scraper to collect NFT data from NFTrade and format it all into a nice, easy to manipulate, CSV, I wrote about how I needed to add multiple fields of data to my collected list of NFT info, and learned some very handy techniques for filtering lists of objects, merging two lists together based on matching attributes, and even adding entirely new attributes to each object in the list.
Python has some very cool methods available in it to make, what seemed like complex tasks, quite simple, and I hope you find it useful.
And last but not least, I wrote an article about how GitHub Pull Request Templates can streamline PRs in dev teams.
We’ve all been on that dev team where someone opens a PR with no context or useful commit messages about the code they actually changed. While that works fine for a solo dev who knows the code inside and out, when you’ve got multiple devs working on multiple features in a code base simultaneously, it’s not good.
Instead of relying on devs to copy/paste some sort of template into each PR to tell a story about the code changes (because let’s face it, we’re really lazy), just add a GitHub pull request template to the project repo. Each time a new PR is opened, the template will populate in GitHub with all the required fields laid out in markdown each time. Easy peasy.
Nowadays, it’s one of the first things I add to any new project I’m starting at work - it just makes everything so much smoother for the team.
I hope you enjoyed this month’s edition of “Paige Codes.” Please share with your friends if you did.
See you again at the end of March,
- Paige
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