The Sequel Debate: When Paranoia Meets Architecture

Sun Nov 16 2025

Sometimes the best way to end an argument is to discover you’re actually having one.  More

Python by Structure: Context Managers and the With Statement

Sun Nov 16 2025

Timothy stared at his screen in frustration. His script had crashed halfway through processing a batch of log files, and now he couldn't open any of them. "Margaret, I keep getting 'too many open files' errors. But I'm closing them! Look - I have file.close() right here."  More

Python by Structure: Generator Delegation with Yield From

Sun Nov 16 2025

Timothy was studying a function that traversed a nested directory structure, and his forehead was creased with confusion. "Margaret, I'm trying to understand this code. It has yield from in it, and I can't figure out what it's doing differently than just yield."  More

AWS Lambda Error: Task timed out after X seconds (VPC Egress Block)

Sun Nov 16 2025

This is not a code failure. It is a VPC routing failure.  More

AWS Lambda Error: Task timed out after X seconds

Sun Nov 16 2025

This error occurs when your function exceeds its allowed execution time.  More

AWS Lambda Error - Lambda was unable to decrypt the environment variables because KMS access was denied

Sun Nov 16 2025

This error means Lambda wasn’t able to decrypt environment variables because it lacked the necessary KMS permissions.  More

The Secret Life of Python: Metaclass Secrets - Classes That Create Classes

Fri Nov 14 2025

Timothy was studying Django's ORM when something made him pause. "Margaret, how does Django's models.Model work? I write class User(models.Model): with fields like name = models.CharField(), and Django automatically creates database tables, validates types, and manages queries. How does the base class customize what happens when I define my class? What's controlling class creation itself?"  More

Python by Structure: The For/Else Block You Didn't Know Existed

Fri Nov 14 2025

"Margaret," Timothy said, looking up from his code, "I learned about try/else from you yesterday. But I just saw else after a for loop. That can't be right, can it?"  More

AWS Lambda Error - The provided execution role does not have permissions to call PutObject on S3

Fri Nov 14 2025

This error means Lambda was not allowed to write to the S3 bucket.  More

AWS Lambda Error - Handler 'index.handler' missing on module 'index'

Fri Nov 14 2025

This error simply means the entry point Lambda was told to load does not exist.  More

Python by Structure: The Try/Else Block You're Not Using

Fri Nov 14 2025

Timothy slumped in his chair, staring at a function he'd written to load configuration files. "Margaret, I keep getting errors in the wrong places. When my config parser fails, it says 'file not found' even though the file exists. The structure feels... muddled."  More

The Secret Life of Python: Descriptor Secrets - How Properties Really Work

Thu Nov 13 2025

Timothy was examining a class definition when something caught his attention. "Margaret, I don't understand how @property actually works. I write @property above a method, and suddenly it acts like an attribute. How does Python know to call my method when I access obj.name instead of obj.name()? What's the magic?"  More

AWS Lambda Error - “Unable to import module 'lambda_function': No module named 'requests'

Thu Nov 13 2025

This error is Lambda’s way of saying you forgot to bring your toolbox.  More

AWS Lambda Error - AccessDeniedException: User is not authorized to perform lambda:InvokeFunction

Thu Nov 13 2025

This appears when something — a user, another Lambda, API Gateway, EventBridge, Step Functions, or an IAM principal — tries to invoke your function without the correct IAM permissions.  More

The Secret Life of Python: Context Manager Secrets - The Magic of `with`

Thu Nov 13 2025

Timothy was reviewing database code when he noticed something puzzling. "Margaret, I keep seeing this with statement everywhere. with open(file), with lock, with database.transaction(). What's so special about with? Why not just call the functions normally?"  More

The Secret Life of Python: Decorator Secrets - Functions That Wrap Functions

Wed Nov 12 2025

Timothy was debugging a Flask application when he encountered something puzzling. "Margaret, what's this @ symbol doing above this function? The code has @app.route('/home') and then @login_required stacked on top of each other. Are these comments? Some kind of metadata?"  More

The Merge Conflict Mediator

Tue Nov 11 2025

The conference room had that particular tension that comes from two brilliant people who both think they're right.  More

The Python Structure Viewer: A Clear Window into Your Code

Tue Nov 11 2025

Every Python script has its own rhythm — loops, branches, and calls that can be hard to follow once the file grows. The Python Structure Viewer on pacificw.com makes that rhythm visible. It’s a local browser-based dashboard that translates Python code into a readable flow of logic, helping you see how a program moves rather than what each line means.  More

AWS Lambda Error: Unable to import module 'lambda_function': No module named 'requests'

Tue Nov 11 2025

This message appears in CloudWatch Logs immediately after deployment. The function doesn’t even reach your handler — it fails during initialization when trying to import external libraries that aren’t present in the runtime.  More

The Secret Life of Python: Generator Secrets - Functions That Remember

Mon Nov 10 2025

Timothy was reviewing code when he encountered something that made him do a double-take. "Margaret, what's this yield keyword? This function has yield instead of return, and when I call it, I get some weird generator object instead of a value. What's going on?"  More

The Secret Life of Python: The Iterator Protocol - Why For Loops Are Magic

Sun Nov 9 2025

Timothy was explaining Python to a colleague from C++ when he got stumped. "So in Python, you can loop over lists, dictionaries, files, strings, ranges, sets... how does for know what to do with all these different types?"  More

The Secret Life of Python: The Descriptor Protocol - How Properties Really Work

Fri Nov 7 2025

Timothy was reviewing a colleague's code when he stopped at an unfamiliar pattern. "Margaret, what's this @property decorator doing? Look at this - it's a method, but you call it without parentheses like it's just a regular attribute. I've never seen anything like it."  More

The Ones Who Stayed: A Survivor's Story

Fri Nov 7 2025

My name is David. I'm a CTO. And today I fired my entire cloud engineering team.  More

The Secret Life of Python: The Copy Dilemma - Shallow vs Deep Copying Explained

Thu Nov 6 2025

Timothy was tracking down a bizarre bug. "Margaret, I'm going crazy," he said, pointing at his screen. "I made a copy of my data structure, modified the copy, and somehow the original changed too! I thought copying was supposed to prevent that."  More

The Secret Life of Python: The String Intern Pool - When Two Strings Are One Object

Thu Nov 6 2025

Timothy was debugging a performance bottleneck when he noticed something strange in his profiler output. "Margaret, look at this," he said, pointing at his screen. "I'm comparing thousands of string values, and sometimes the comparisons are incredibly fast - but other times they're slower. Both use ==, so why the difference?"  More

The 9:15 AM Email That Changed Everything

Thu Nov 6 2025

My name is Meera Krishnan. I'm a 28 year old Python developer. And today I lost my job.  More

The Secret Life of Python: The Memory Manager - How Python's Garbage Collector Works

Wed Nov 5 2025

Timothy was investigating a memory leak when Margaret found him staring at his monitoring dashboard. "Look at this," he said, pointing to a slow but steady memory increase. "My application creates thousands of objects, processes them, and I'm pretty sure I'm done with them. But the memory isn't getting freed."  More

The Secret Life of Python: The Integer Cache - Why Small Numbers Share Identity

Wed Nov 5 2025

Timothy was debugging a puzzling issue when he called Margaret over. "Look at this," he said, pointing at his terminal. "These two comparisons should behave the same way, but they don't."  More

When DynamoDB Throttles: Restoring Stability Under Load (Lambda → DynamoDB)

Tue Nov 4 2025

You’ve got a smooth-running serverless workflow — until DynamoDB starts rejecting requests faster than you can scale them.  More

The Secret Life of Python: The Executor - Running Blocking Code Without Blocking

Tue Nov 4 2025

Timothy found Margaret reviewing performance metrics, looking troubled. "I've built this beautiful async system," he said, "but I need to integrate with an old library that does synchronous file processing. When I call it, my entire event loop freezes. Everything stops until the blocking operation completes."  More

The Secret Life of Python: The Barrier - Synchronizing Groups at Checkpoints

Tue Nov 4 2025

Timothy burst into Margaret's office with his laptop. "I've got a distributed data processing system - five worker tasks each processing their chunk of data. But here's the problem: they all need to finish Phase 1 before any of them can start Phase 2. Right now, the fast workers race ahead while slow ones lag behind, and everything gets corrupted."  More

When S3 Encryption Breaks Lambda: Recovering with an SQS DLQ (S3 → Lambda → DynamoDB)

Tue Nov 4 2025

When KMS policies silently block your Lambda reads, the danger isn’t the failure itself — it’s not knowing it happened.  More

The Condition - Advanced Task Coordination

Mon Nov 3 2025

Margaret found Timothy in the library's coordination room, staring at a wall covered in task dependency charts. "The Event pattern works beautifully for simple signals," he said, "but I've hit something more complex. I need tasks to wait for specific conditions to become true, then wake up and check again"...  More

When Partial Writes Sneak Through: DynamoDB Consistency After S3 Failures (S3 → Lambda → DynamoDB)

Mon Nov 3 2025

When the cloud fails halfway, DynamoDB remembers — even when the rest of your system forgets.  More

S3 Access Denied: When Lambda Can’t Read What It Triggers (S3 → Lambda → DynamoDB)

Mon Nov 3 2025

In AWS, an event can trigger successfully even when your function can’t see the data it was told about.  More

The Lock: Synchronization Primitives for Shared State

Mon Nov 3 2025

Timothy was excited about his new caching system. The library's book lookup was slow, so he'd built a cache that multiple async tasks could update. But when he ran it, something was wrong.  More

The Queue: Producer-Consumer Patterns and Async Communication

Sat Nov 1 2025

Timothy stared at his screen, frustrated once again. He'd successfully made his book scanning system run multiple tasks concurrently, but now he had a different problem: chaos.  More

The Task Scheduler: Managing Multiple Coroutines with asyncio

Sat Nov 1 2025

Timothy stared at his screen, frustrated. The library's new automated inventory system needed to check the status of books across three different sources: the main catalog, the reserve collection, and the inter-library loan system. He'd written async functions for each source, but his code was taking forever to run.  More

The Async Iterator Part 2: Streaming Data and Real-World Patterns

Fri Oct 31 2025

The next morning, Timothy arrived at the library early, eager to apply what he'd learned about async iteration. He'd spent the evening refactoring his log analyzer, and now he wanted to tackle something more ambitious: building a real-time dashboard that streamed library statistics.  More

When Atomicity Meets Idempotency: DynamoDB Transactions + Powertools (S3 → Lambda → DynamoDB)

Fri Oct 31 2025

In distributed systems, reliability isn’t luck — it’s architecture.  More

The Async Iterator: When Regular Loops Block the Event Loop

Fri Oct 31 2025

Timothy stared at his screen, puzzled. His async web server was working beautifully for most requests, but whenever someone requested the log file analysis endpoint, the entire server seemed to freeze for several seconds.  More

When Lambda Writes Twice: Idempotency Keys in DynamoDB (S3 → Lambda → DynamoDB)

Fri Oct 31 2025

By adding a one-line guard to your DynamoDB writes, you transform a best-effort pipeline into a predictable, idempotent architecture.  More

S3 Event Timing Drift: When Lambda Triggers Before the Object Exists (S3 → Lambda → DynamoDB)

Thu Oct 30 2025

When a pipeline runs faster than the storage it depends on, things get strange.  More

The Context Variable Vault: Advanced Patterns and Framework Integration

Thu Oct 30 2025

The next morning, Timothy arrived at the library with his laptop and a list of questions. He found Margaret already at her desk, reviewing some code.  More

The Context Variable Vault: Thread-Safe State Without Globals

Thu Oct 30 2025

Timothy stared at his laptop screen, frustration mounting. The library's new async web server was working—mostly—but the logs were a disaster.  More

S3 Event Duplication: When Lambda Fires Twice for the Same Object (S3 → Lambda → DynamoDB)

Thu Oct 30 2025

When your event-driven pipeline starts “helping too much,” one upload can quietly double your workload — and your bill.  More

Living with the GIL: Strategies for Concurrent Python

Wed Oct 29 2025

Timothy and Margaret walked through the library's quiet reading room toward the small coffee shop in the corner. The afternoon sun streamed through the tall windows, and only a few patrons remained, absorbed in their books.  More

The GIL Revealed: Why Python Threading Isn't Really Parallel

Wed Oct 29 2025

Timothy stared at his laptop screen in the library's back office, his brow furrowed. He'd spent the last hour trying to speed up a data processing script using Python's threading module. The numbers didn't make sense.  More

AWS Lambda: “The Vanishing Event” — When the Payload Goes Missing

Wed Oct 29 2025

The Vanishing Event is a silent execution failure where the payload disappears before your code even starts.  More

AWS Lambda: “The Duplicate Delivery Dilemma” — When the Same Event Hits Twice

Wed Oct 29 2025

The Duplicate Delivery Dilemma isn’t an AWS bug — it’s the cost of safety.  More

Building DynamoDB Transactions: Coordinating Atomic, Multi-Item Writes

Tue Oct 28 2025

Learn how to perform atomic, multi-item operations in DynamoDB using transactions.  More

The Circular Import Problem: Breaking Dependency Cycles

Tue Oct 28 2025

Timothy's library system had grown elegantly. The Book class needed to access database functions. The database module needed to import Book to save records. He added the imports, ran the code, and Python exploded with a cryptic error: "ImportError: cannot import name 'Book' from partially initialized module."  More

The Search Path Mystery: Where Python Finds Modules

Tue Oct 28 2025

Timothy's carefully organized package worked perfectly on his development machine. He installed it on the production server, and Python couldn't find it. "ModuleNotFoundError," the error screamed. "No module named 'library_tools'." But the files were right there!  More

S3 Bucket Versioning Drift: When Deletes Don’t Really Delete (S3 → Lambda → DynamoDB)

Tue Oct 28 2025

When versioning goes sideways, “deleted” objects keep living rent-free — and sometimes, they bring their friends along for another round of processing.  More

The Package Architecture: Building Importable Code

Mon Oct 27 2025

Timothy had written dozens of useful Python modules for the library—database utilities, book cataloging functions, report generators. But each script lived in isolation, copied and pasted between projects, versions diverging, improvements lost.  More

S3 Event Notification System Trigger Failure: When the Lambda Never Fires (S3 → Lambda → DynamoDB)

Mon Oct 27 2025

When S3 Event Notification System fails, the rest of your architecture doesn’t even know.  More

AWS Lambda: "Exactly Once" — The Myth of Idempotency in Serverless

Sun Oct 26 2025

“Exactly once” is a comforting story that doesn’t survive contact with production.  More

AWS Lambda: “The Silent Retry” — When Lambda Quietly Runs Twice (or Thrice)

Sun Oct 26 2025

Welcome to The Silent Retry — when AWS Lambda automatically re-invokes your function after an asynchronous failure or timeout you never saw.  More

The Concurrent Corridors: Async/Await and the Event Loop

Sun Oct 26 2025

Timothy's library system needed to fetch book metadata from multiple external APIs—publisher information, reader reviews, similar book recommendations. His synchronous code fetched them one at a time, and the library staff waited... and waited... and waited.  More

After the Outage: The Zoom Call That Changed Everything

Sun Oct 26 2025

TextMiner stayed up when AWS went down. A week later, founders Marcus and Sarah shared how. This Zoom call became the blueprint for resilience.  More

The Outage That Made Us Stronger

Sat Oct 25 2025

How chaos engineering saved our payment system before the next disaster... More

Building DynamoDB Conditional Writes: Protecting Data Integrity

Fri Oct 24 2025

Learn how to use DynamoDB’s conditional expressions to prevent duplicate items, enforce uniqueness, and perform atomic updates — all through the AWS CLI.  More

AWS Lambda: “The Stuck Invocation” — When Lambda Never Finishes but Never Fails

Fri Oct 24 2025

A “stuck” Lambda isn’t a mystery — it’s a symptom of unfinished work.  More

The Library Method: Understanding Context Managers

Fri Oct 24 2025

Context managers aren't magic - they're Python's way of automating try/finally for guaranteed cleanup.  More

When Everyone Else Fell, We Stood

Fri Oct 24 2025

The AWS US-EAST-1 outage on October 20-21, 2025, affected thousands of services and companies. But for TextMiner, it became the moment that proved their architecture, their approach, and their hard-won lessons from nearly failing eighteen months earlier.  More

The Descriptor Workshop: Properties Under the Hood

Thu Oct 23 2025

Timothy had used properties extensively—adding validation, computing values, maintaining encapsulation. But he'd never questioned how @property actually worked. When he wrote book.title, how did Python know to call a method instead of accessing an attribute? What was the mechanism behind this seemingly magical behavior?  More

The Interface Gallery: Abstract Base Classes and Protocols

Thu Oct 23 2025

Timothy had built a library system with multiple storage backends—database storage, file storage, cloud storage. Each backend had the same methods (save_book, load_book, delete_book), but nothing enforced this contract. Developers kept forgetting to implement all methods, leading to runtime crashes.  More

Building DynamoDB TTL: Auto-Expire Old Data

Thu Oct 23 2025

Learn how to automatically delete stale data in DynamoDB using Time-to-Live (TTL). In this lab, you’ll add an expiration attribute to items, enable TTL on the table, and watch DynamoDB clean up expired records automatically — all from your terminal.  More

AWS Lambda: “The Missing Error Message” — When Lambda Fails Silently Through API Gateway

Thu Oct 23 2025

Lambda and API Gateway are powerful together — until configuration drift turns them into unreliable narrators.  More

AWS Lambda: “Unexpected Data Persisted Across Invocations” — When Reused Containers Keep Old State

Wed Oct 22 2025

Ready to build? Let’s roll up our sleeves and implement a real-time DynamoDB Stream with the AWS CLI. You’ll capture table updates, send them through a Lambda function, and verify events live — all in one clean workflow.  More

Building DynamoDB Streams: Capture Item Changes in Real Time (Vol. 2 – Streams)

Wed Oct 22 2025

Ready to build? Let’s roll up our sleeves and implement a real-time DynamoDB Stream with the AWS CLI. You’ll capture table updates, send them through a Lambda function, and verify events live — all in one clean workflow.  More

The Blueprint Factory: Dataclasses and Automated Design

Wed Oct 22 2025

Timothy had written his hundredth Book class. Each time, the same tedious pattern: write __init__, define each attribute, write __repr__, write __eq__, write comparison methods. His simple data-holding classes had become exercises in repetitive boilerplate.  More

The Composition Workshop: Building with "Has-A" Relationships

Mon Oct 20 2025

Timothy had embraced inheritance enthusiastically—too enthusiastically. His library catalog system had become a tangled hierarchy where AudiobookWithSubscription inherited from Audiobook, which inherited from DigitalBook, which inherited from Book. Adding a new feature meant navigating four levels of parent classes.  More

Building DynamoDB Query Patterns: An AWS CLI Tutorial

Mon Oct 20 2025

Learn to design and test query patterns in DynamoDB — including composite keys, prefixes, and filters — all from your terminal. This tutorial will help you master how to read efficiently without scanning your entire table.  More

Building with DynamoDB: A 4-Minute AWS CLI Tutorial

Sat Oct 18 2025

Learn to create a DynamoDB table, index it, and avoid common design traps — all from your terminal. This tutorial will help you understand the 10 GB item collection size limit (per partition key) that can trigger the ItemCollectionSizeLimitExceededException if your design isn’t balanced.  More

Amazon DynamoDB: Fixing the ItemCollectionSizeLimitExceededException - The 10 GB Index Trap

Sat Oct 18 2025

Understand why DynamoDB index partitions hit a hard 10 GB limit — and how to redesign your access patterns to avoid hitting the wall.  More

AWS Lambda: The Vanishing Payload — When Event Data Shrinks or Mutates in Transit

Sat Oct 18 2025

In distributed systems, missing data is worse than failed data.  More

The Method Workshop: Class Methods, Static Methods, and Properties

Sat Oct 18 2025

Timothy had mastered instance methods—functions that operated on individual objects through self. But his Book class had needs that didn't fit the instance method pattern. He wanted factory methods to create books from different data sources. He needed utility functions related to books but not tied to any specific book. He wanted controlled access to attributes with validation.  More

The Special Protocols Room: Magic Methods and Operator Overloading

Fri Oct 17 2025

Timothy had built a working Book class, but something felt incomplete. He couldn't sort a list of books by year. He couldn't compare two books to see if they were equal. He couldn't use len() on a book to get page count. His custom class felt like a second-class citizen compared to Python's built-in types.  More

The Inheritance Gallery: Parent and Child Classes

Fri Oct 17 2025

Timothy's library had grown beyond simple books. He now cataloged audiobooks, ebooks, and rare manuscripts—each with unique attributes. Audiobooks had narrators and durations. Ebooks had file formats and download links. Manuscripts had preservation conditions and historical significance.  More

The Blueprint Room: Classes and Instances

Thu Oct 16 2025

Timothy had been creating book records for weeks—each one a dictionary with title, author, year, and page count. The pattern was repetitive...  More

Fixing the DynamoDB SerializationException: The Data Contract Guide

Thu Oct 16 2025

Understand why DynamoDB’s type system breaks — and how to fix it by aligning your app’s data model with DynamoDB’s contract once and for all.  More

AWS Lambda: “Phantom Success” — When Lambda Reports Victory but the Work Never Completed

Thu Oct 16 2025

A function that returns 200 while leaving work undone is not successful — it’s unverified.  More

The Library Method: Understanding Generators

Wed Oct 15 2025

Timothy: "Margaret, I need the method again. I was working with generators today and something clicked - but then it un-clicked."  More

The Nested Patterns: Advanced Comprehension Techniques

Wed Oct 15 2025

Timothy had mastered basic comprehensions—single transformations, simple filtering, dictionary building. But the library's latest project demanded more: a multi-dimensional catalog index where books were grouped by decade, then by genre, then by author. His flat comprehensions couldn't handle the nested structure.  More

The Pattern Looms: List and Dict Comprehensions

Wed Oct 15 2025

Timothy had been writing transformation loops for weeks—iterate through books, extract some data, build a new collection. His code worked, but it was verbose. Three or four lines to accomplish what felt like a single thought: "give me all the titles from recent books."  More

AWS Lambda: Phantom Retries — When Logs Multiply but Events Don’t Exist

Wed Oct 15 2025

Welcome to Phantom Retries — the haunting illusion of multiple Lambda executions that never actually happened.  More

AWS S3: Event Notifications Gone Silent — Why Your S3 Triggers Don’t Fire

Wed Oct 15 2025

Your pipeline is humming along — S3 uploads are landing perfectly — but the next step never runs.Your Lambda function doesn’t fire. Your SQS queue is empty. Your SNS topic stays quiet.  More

The Functional Toolkit: Map, Filter, and Reduce

Mon Oct 13 2025

Timothy had mastered lambda functions and was using them everywhere—in sorting, filtering, and transforming data. But his code still felt repetitive. He found himself writing the same for loop patterns: iterate through a collection, transform each item, collect results. Or iterate through a collection, test each item, keep some. Or iterate through a collection, accumulate a single value.  More

The Anonymous Workers: Lambda Functions Explained

Mon Oct 13 2025

Timothy was cataloging books by various criteria—sometimes by publication year, sometimes by title length, sometimes by author's last name. Each time, he wrote a small helper function with a def statement, gave it a name, and used it once. His code was cluttered with dozens of single-use functions.  More

AWS Lambda: Silent Failures — When Your Function Succeeds on Paper but Fails in Practice

Mon Oct 13 2025

Lambda functions can fail in ways that don’t register as failures. They complete execution and return a valid response, but internally they never finished their intended task.  More

AWS S3: Checksum Mismatch — When S3 Uploads Don’t Match Your Files

Mon Oct 13 2025

You upload a large file to S3 — maybe through the AWS CLI, an SDK, or a data pipeline — and everything looks fine. The CLI confirms success. The object appears in the console.  More

LocalStack S3 CRUD Lab: A Hands-On Guide to Buckets and Objects

Mon Oct 13 2025

By the end of this lab, you'll have manually performed all core S3 operations in a local AWS environment: creating buckets, uploading files, reading objects, updating content, and deleting resources. More importantly, you'll understand what happens when things go wrong—and how to fix them.  More

The Night We Admitted AI Writes Better Code

Sun Oct 12 2025

Dylan was stirring his fourth cup of coffee. I was poking at a stale vending-machine sandwich that looked older than our last code freeze. We were two senior devs, ten-plus years in the trenches, supposed to be debugging an API issue in production.  More

Code Deconstruction: The Nested List Comprehension

Sun Oct 12 2025

You'll encounter patterns like this in data processing pipelines, ETL scripts, report generation systems, and any codebase where developers prize brevity over clarity. Sure, a senior Python developer can parse this in 10-15 seconds. But what about the junior developer on their second week? The contractor brought in at 2am to fix a production bug?  More

AWS Lambda Error: The Great Timeout Trap — When Lambda and Its Callers Stop Talking at the Same Time

Sun Oct 12 2025

Your Lambda runs beautifully in isolation. Then you plug it into API Gateway or Step Functions — and suddenly, users start getting timeout errors even though your function logs show it completed successfully.  More

AWS S3: Error 503 Slow Down — When S3 Tells You to Wait Your Turn

Sun Oct 12 2025

Your app uploads files to S3 at full throttle — maybe through a data pipeline, a CI/CD job, or a burst of Lambda executions. Everything’s humming along until suddenly the CLI returns this...  More

A Guide to Installing and Starting LocalStack on Windows 11, macOS, and Chromebook Linux

Sun Oct 12 2025

This guide will walk you through the process of installing and starting LocalStack, the AWS local emulator, on three different platforms. The installation requires Docker to be running in the background and will use the LocalStack CLI to manage everything from your terminal.  More

Bringing Local Stacks to Life: Terraform Meets Real Code (in LocalStack)

Sun Oct 12 2025

The moment you first run real code through Terraform inside LocalStack, something changes. Your infrastructure isn’t just defined anymore — it’s alive.  More

When Code Builds the Cloud: Terraforming a Local AWS Stack

Sun Oct 12 2025

The first time you watch Terraform spin up a real application inside LocalStack, it’s oddly satisfying. No AWS credentials. No billing surprises. No waiting for IAM policies to sync. Just code building the cloud — locally, safely, predictably.  More

Terraform: The Conversation Between You and Your Infrastructure

Sat Oct 11 2025

Whether you’re deploying to AWS or to LocalStack, you’re practicing the same principle: treat your infrastructure like code, because it is.  More

Code Deconstruction: The Counting Lambda

Sat Oct 11 2025

You might encounter a snippet like this in a highly-optimized library, a coding challenge designed to test your knowledge of functional programming, or a playful one-liner from a seasoned developer's private notebook.  More

AWS Lambda: Event Ordering Gone Wrong — How Lambda’s Concurrency Can Scramble Your Event Stream

Sat Oct 11 2025

You process events in order — or at least, you think you do. Then one day, your downstream logs show a user being “deleted” before they were “created,” or an order marked “shipped” before it was “placed.”   More

AWS S3: Error 301 Moved Permanently — When S3 Redirects Break Your Uploads

Sat Oct 11 2025

You upload a file to your S3 bucket using the AWS CLI or SDK, and instead of a success message, you get...  More

The Custom Conveyor: Building Your Own Iterators

Fri Oct 10 2025

Timothy understood how iterators worked, but Margaret's next challenge tested his knowledge: "The library needs a custom catalog browsing system. Patrons should view entries by decade, skip damaged records, and page through results fifty at a time. Build it using the Iterator Protocol."  More

The Conveyor Belt Protocol: Understanding Iterators

Fri Oct 10 2025

Timothy had been using for loops for months, never questioning how they worked. But when he tried to iterate over a custom data structure he'd built—a specialized book index—Python refused with a cryptic error...  More

AWS Lambda Error: “Phantom Executions” — When Lambda Retries Complete After the Caller Has Moved On

Fri Oct 10 2025

Your Lambda retries dutifully — exactly as designed — but the system it was supposed to update has already moved on.  More

Amazon S3 Error 409 Conflict — The Silent Battle Between Versioning and Overwrites

Fri Oct 10 2025

Two processes are trying to write to the same file at the exact same moment. It might be two CI/CD pipelines, a pair of Lambda functions, or a retry mechanism gone rogue. The result: S3 detects a collision between concurrent writes and throws up its hands — protecting your data from corruption.  More

The Library Method: Understanding @cache

Thu Oct 9 2025

Timothy arrives at the library, laptop open, wearing a frustrated expression that Margaret recognizes immediately.  More

The Custom Alarm Codes: Creating Your Own Exceptions

Thu Oct 9 2025

Timothy had mastered catching and handling exceptions, but he faced a new challenge. The library's cataloging system raised generic ValueError and KeyError exceptions for dozens of different problems.  More

The Alert System: Try, Except, and Finally

Thu Oct 9 2025

Timothy watched in horror as the entire catalog system crashed. He'd been importing book records from a partner library when a single malformed entry—a book with no publication year—brought everything to a halt. The error message scrolled past, the program died, and three hours of import work vanished.  More

AWS Lambda Error: “Throttling Domino Effect” — When Downstream Retries Multiply Failures Instead of Containing Them

Thu Oct 9 2025

Throttling isn’t the villain — poor retry coordination is.  More

Error 404 Not Found — When Your S3 Object Disappears into the Void

Thu Oct 9 2025

When S3 returns a “404 Not Found,” it’s rarely lying — but it’s often misunderstood.  More

The Custom Portal Design: Building Your Own Context Managers

Wed Oct 8 2025

Timothy had mastered using Python's built-in context managers, but the head librarian's next request stumped him. "We need to time how long our cataloging operations take, but only in production mode. The timing code clutters every function. Can you make it cleaner?"  More

The Automatic Door System: With Statements Explained

Wed Oct 8 2025

Timothy rushed into Margaret's office looking distressed. "The library's file system is corrupted. I've been processing catalog updates all week, and now the system reports hundreds of files are locked—I can't access them, and neither can anyone else."  More

AWS Lambda Error: “Invocation Failed” — When Retries Multiply and Duplicate Events Wreak Havoc

Wed Oct 8 2025

Understanding how Lambda’s retry logic, async behavior, and at-least-once delivery model can trigger duplicate processing and hidden downstream bugs..  More

Error: 403 Forbidden — Why Your Amazon S3 Upload Works in One Region but Fails in Another

Wed Oct 8 2025

How a simple region mix-up can trigger a 403 in S3...  More

The Bug That Wouldn't Break: Lisa Miller's Tuesday Night

Tue Oct 7 2025

When six missing transactions turned into a lesson about self-reliance, persistence, and the people who believe in us.  More

The Pipeline Network: Generator Expressions and Comprehensions

Tue Oct 7 2025

Timothy had mastered generator functions with yield, but his latest task revealed an inefficiency. The head librarian needed a report showing titles of all books published after 2000, authored by British writers, sorted by publication year—but only the first 100 results.  More

The On-Demand Factory: Yield and Lazy Evaluation

Tue Oct 7 2025

Timothy stared at his computer screen in dismay. The library had just digitized its complete archive—three million books—and his program to generate a catalog listing had frozen solid. Margaret found him frantically checking if the system had crashed.  More

AWS Lambda Error: “Rate Exceeded” — When Concurrency and Memory Collide

Tue Oct 7 2025

At first glance, it looks like an API rate limit. But in Lambda, it often means your concurrency quota has been reached. The function is trying to scale up in response to a burst of invocations, but AWS is refusing to allocate additional concurrent executions.  More

Error: 400 Bad Request — Amazon S3 Key Naming Gone Wrong

Tue Oct 7 2025

Developers often forget that while S3 technically allows almost any Unicode character in object keys, certain patterns and encodings can still trigger a 400 Bad Request. One misplaced slash, space, or unescaped symbol can send the entire PUT request off the rails.  More

The Parameter Laboratory: Decorators with Arguments

Mon Oct 6 2025

Timothy had mastered basic decorators, but the head librarian's next request revealed a limitation. "I need different logging levels for different functions—some should log detailed information, others just errors. Can your decorators handle configuration?"  More

The Function Modification Station: Basic Decorator Mechanics

Mon Oct 6 2025

Timothy had mastered functions that remembered their environment through closures, but Margaret had one more revelation waiting. She led him to a workshop labeled "The Function Modification Station"—a place where existing procedures could be enhanced with new capabilities without rewriting them.  More

AWS Lambda Error: Timeouts and Retries

Mon Oct 6 2025

A Lambda function runs flawlessly in development, yet in production, it suddenly starts duplicating work — database writes happen twice, S3 objects appear in pairs, and messages stack up in your DLQ. What happened?  More

Error: 403 AccessDenied — When Public Access Blocks Your S3 Goals

Mon Oct 6 2025

You check the bucket policy. You have full permissions. The IAM role looks right. Everything should work — but it doesn’t. This is one of the most common (and most frustrating) S3 errors: 403 AccessDenied. The truth is, S3 isn’t rejecting you out of spite. It’s enforcing layers of protection you might not even realize exist.  More

AWS Lambda Error: Cold Starts

Sun Oct 5 2025

How testing with my mom's name caught a data corruption bug.  More

AWS Lambda Error: Cold Starts

Sun Oct 5 2025

Is your AWS Lambda API randomly “hiccuping”? The culprit might not be your code — it’s the cold start.  More

Error: 409 BucketAlreadyExists — The Global Name Collision Problem

Sun Oct 5 2025

It’s late on a Sunday deployment. Your Terraform plan runs smoothly until suddenly it halts:  More

The Silent Bug: How My Test Hid a Floating Point Error

Sat Oct 4 2025

Six months into my role as a software engineer at PayStream, a payment processing startup, I was about to deploy a refactor that would handle our entire transaction reconciliation system. My manager, Jake, had already signed off. QA had run their regression suite. All tests green.  More

AWS Lambda Error: The Exception Handling Black Hole

Sat Oct 4 2025

You deploy a new Lambda function that runs flawlessly in test. The logs are clean, the return values look good, and the metrics dashboard shows steady traffic. Then, a few days later, a customer reports missing records—data that should’ve been processed simply isn’t there.  More

Error: 416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable — The Amazon S3 Partial Download Trap

Sat Oct 4 2025

It’s late, traffic is spiking, and your download service begins failing with cryptic 416 errors. Users report broken downloads and incomplete files. At first glance, this looks like an S3 outage — but it isn’t. Amazon S3 is rejecting a range request that doesn’t make sense.  More

The Python That Betrayed Me: When Your Code Works Locally But Fails in the Cloud

Sat Oct 4 2025

Hi, I'm Mark. I've been a DevOps engineer for eight years, and I thought I knew Python inside and out. I'd automated infrastructure, built deployment pipelines, and written more scripts than I could count. Python was my reliable companion—until it betrayed me in the cloud.  More

The Coffee Break That Caught the Bug

Fri Oct 3 2025

Hi, I'm Maya. Four months into my first job as a backend engineer at FinTrack, I was about to deploy my first AWS Lambda to production. Solo. No hand-holding, no senior engineer double-checking my work.  More

Python's Mutable Default Mistake

Fri Oct 3 2025

You write a helper function with a default list parameter. It works perfectly—the first time. The second time? Your "empty" list already has data in it. Welcome to Python's most notorious gotcha.  More

Error: 412 Precondition Failed — The Hidden Costs of Conditional Requests

Fri Oct 3 2025

It’s deployment night, and your pipeline suddenly breaks on an S3 upload. Instead of a clean success, you see...  More

The Closure Phenomenon: Functions That Remember

Fri Oct 3 2025

Timothy had mastered function scope and understood how local variables vanished when functions returned. But Margaret had a more mysterious phenomenon to reveal. She led him deeper into The Experimental Workshop to a chamber where functions could carry memories with them.  More

The Scope Investigation: Local, Global, and Nonlocal Variables

Fri Oct 3 2025

Timothy had mastered Python's data structures, but Margaret sensed he was ready for a fundamental shift. She led him away from the archive chambers to a new wing of the library—The Experimental Workshop—where functions lived and operated. "Data structures hold information," she explained, "but functions transform it."  More

The Decorator That Saved Me 500 Lines of Code

Fri Oct 3 2025

Hi, I'm Rachel.

Three months into my first Python job at DataFlow Analytics, I was drowning in my own code. Not broken code. Working code. Code that did exactly what it was supposed to do.  More

The Assembly Line: String Formatting and f-strings

Thu Oct 2 2025

Timothy had learned that strings were immutable manuscripts, but now he needed to create them efficiently. Margaret led him to the String Assembly Line—a workshop where text could be constructed from templates and dynamic data.  More

The Immutable Manuscripts: Why Strings Never Change

Thu Oct 2 2025

Timothy had mastered tuples and their immutable nature, but Margaret had one more crucial lesson waiting. She led him to the library's oldest wing—The Ancient Scrolls Department—where text itself was preserved in permanent form.  More

Writing UTC-Friendly Datetime Code in Python

Thu Oct 2 2025

You’ve written Python code that works fine on your machine. But when your app runs in production across servers in different regions, the logs don’t line up. An event that happened at 10 AM UTC looks like it happened at 3 AM on one server and 6 PM on another.  More

Handling Time Zones in Python: Avoiding Naive Datetime Bugs

Thu Oct 2 2025

Imagine you’re building an event scheduling app. A user in New York creates a meeting for 3 PM. That timestamp is stored in your database. When a colleague in London opens the app, they see the event at 3 PM London time instead of the correct converted time.  More

Error: 405 Method Not Allowed — When Wrong HTTP Methods Derail S3 Requests

Thu Oct 2 2025

You try to upload, copy, or delete an object — and instead of S3 complying, you hit a wall. The bucket exists, the key looks right, but S3 refuses the request.  More

Retrying Flaky API Calls in Python

Thu Oct 2 2025

You're making a request to an external API, but sometimes the server is busy or the network is slow. Instead of getting a response, your program crashes with a connection error. You want to make your program more resilient by automatically trying the request again a few times before giving up.  More

The Day My Boss Asked Me to Explain My "Clever" Code

Wed Oct 1 2025

Hi, I'm Maya. I was three months into my first real Python job when Marcus, my tech lead, pulled up a chair next to my desk. "Hey, can you walk me through this?" He pointed at my screen.  More

The Unpacking Ceremony: Multiple Assignment and Tuple Magic

Wed Oct 1 2025

Timothy had mastered the immutability of tuples, but Margaret had saved the most elegant lesson for last. She led him to a ceremonial chamber where tuples could be "unpacked"—their contents distributed into separate variables in a single graceful operation.  More

The Immutable Exhibition: Why Tuples Never Change

Wed Oct 1 2025

Timothy had mastered lists for organizing books, but one afternoon Margaret led him to a restricted section of the library: The Locked Display Cases. Here, collections were sealed behind glass—visible but permanently unchangeable.  More

Error: 404 Not Found — When Missing Keys Look Like Outages

Wed Oct 1 2025

It’s mid-shift, traffic is steady, and suddenly your app starts failing with an error. To the business, this looks like an outage — the bucket appears broken, customer data appears missing. But the truth? The bucket is fine. It’s the key (object path) that doesn’t exist.  More

The Code We Leave Behind

Tue Sept 30 2025

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (1906-1992) pioneered compiler theory and made programming accessible to everyone. She believed that the most dangerous phrase in any language was "we've always done it this way." This is Part 3 of an ongoing series imagining Grace Hopper reviewing modern Python code. What would she say to 10,000 developers at the world's largest cloud computing conference?  More

The Frozen Collection Vault: frozenset and Set Immutability

Tue Sept 30 2025

Timothy's membership registry had transformed how the library tracked visitors and members, but Professor Williams arrived with a problem that would reveal a fundamental limitation of his set system.  More

The Membership Registry: Set Operations and Uniqueness

Tue Sept 30 2025

Timothy had mastered his dictionary filing cabinet, but one morning brought an unusual request that would introduce him to an entirely different cataloging system. Professor Chen needed to track library membership—not who checked out which books, just whether someone was a member or not.  More

301 Moved Permanently — The Amazon S3 Region Redirect Trap

Tue Sept 30 2025

You’ve got a bucket you know exists — but every request to S3 throws back a 301 error. To your users, it looks like the bucket is gone. To your dashboard, it looks like downtime. But the truth? The bucket is alive and well — just in a different region. More

Grace Hopper Walks Into a Code Review

Mon Sept 29 2025

What happens when Grace Hopper reviews your code.  More

The Specialized Archives: defaultdict, Counter, and OrderedDict

Mon Sept 29 2025

Timothy's standard filing cabinet had served the library brilliantly, but he kept encountering the same frustrating patterns. Each project required writing the same preparatory code before actual work could begin. Margaret introduced him to the library's specialized filing systems—purpose-built variants designed for common tasks.  More

Beyond `i` and `tmp`: Writing Code for Humans, Inspired by Grace Hopper

Mon Sept 29 2025

If you've spent any time in programming communities, you've seen them: the unwritten rules. The "universal" conventions like using i, j, k for loop counters or tmp and val for temporary variables. They’re presented as a shared language, a way to make code feel familiar.  More

Error: SignatureDoesNotMatch — The Amazon S3 Authentication Mystery

Mon Sept 29 2025

It’s late, traffic is spiking, and suddenly every request to S3 starts failing. To the business, it looks like S3 is down. To your team, it feels like chaos. But S3 is fine — the real culprit is authentication drift between your client and AWS. More

What Would Grace Hopper Think of Your Code? (A 2:47 AM Review)

Sun Sept 28 2025

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (1906-1992) pioneered compiler theory, led the team that created COBOL, and spent her career fighting to make computers accessible to humans.  More

The Immutable Key Mystery: What Makes a Dictionary Key Valid

Sun Sept 28 2025

Timothy's filing cabinet had become a marvel of efficiency, but one morning brought a crisis that would teach him the fundamental rules governing what could serve as a catalog key. The lesson began when a visiting scholar requested the most unusual filing system Timothy had ever encountered.  More

The Great Reorganization: Dictionary Ordering and Resizing

Sun Sept 28 2025

The 1,000-drawer cabinet had been perfect for the library's modest collection, but as word spread about Timothy's revolutionary filing system, requests poured in faster than ever. Soon, troubling signs appeared...  More

Error: AccessDenied for SSE-KMS — When Encryption Breaks S3 Access

Sun Sept 28 2025

It’s 2 AM, production alarms are firing, and every attempt to read or write to S3 comes back with "AccessDenied". But this isn’t your ordinary bucket policy issue. This time, the bucket has SSE-KMS (Server-Side Encryption with AWS KMS) enabled — and the missing link is key permissions. More

The Alternative Filing System: Open Addressing Explained

Sun Sept 28 2025

Timothy's mastery of the chaining cabinet had served him well, but his curiosity about alternative systems led him to discover a completely different approach hidden in the library's eastern wing. Here, the archivists had developed a filing system that handled collisions not by sharing drawers, but by finding new ones entirely.  More

The Collision Protocol: When Two Keys Share a Drawer

Sun Sept 28 2025

Timothy's discovery of the Instant Retrieval Cabinet had revolutionized his library work, but one morning he encountered a problem that would teach him the most important lesson about hash tables: what happens when the system breaks down.  More

Error: 400 Bad Request — Amazon S3 Key Naming Gone Wrong

Sat Sept 27 2025

It’s late in the release cycle, and your application starts failing every time it tries to upload files. Instead of success, you get an error message. To leadership, it looks like S3 is unreliable. To your customers, it looks like downtime. But the truth is simpler — your object keys don’t meet Amazon S3’s naming requirements.  More

Error: 409 Conflict — The Amazon S3 Versioning Headache

Fri Sept 26 2025

It’s 2 AM, production alarms are firing, and your team is scrambling to restore files from S3. Instead of a clean download, you hit...  More

The Instant Retrieval Cabinet: Hash Tables Explained

Fri Sept 26 2025

Timothy the Librarian had always been proud of his bookcase system, but everything changed the day he discovered the Instant Retrieval Cabinet in the library's basement archives. Unlike his traditional bookcases where he had to search shelf by shelf, this mysterious contraption could find any book in mere seconds...  More

The Moving Day Disaster: Understanding List Mutations

Fri Sept 26 2025

Timothy the Librarian thought he understood his bookcase system perfectly. Then came the day that changed everything—the day he discovered that some bookcases aren't what they seem.  More

Tale of Two Bugs: What Sarah and Marcus Taught Me About Learning from Code Disasters

Fri Sept 26 2025

I was reviewing incident reports late one evening when I noticed something fascinating. Two stories, two developers, two production disasters that each cost their companies serious money. But reading them side by side, I realized they told completely different tales about how we grow as engineers.  More

The Million-Dollar Typo: How Sarah's Python Bug Taught Her Everything

Thu Sept 25 2025

Sarah Chen had been at MegaCorp for exactly 127 days when she brought down the entire payment processing system. Not with malicious intent, not with a complex architectural flaw, but with a single misplaced equals sign that would haunt her dreams for months.  More

Error: NoSuchBucket — The Amazon S3 Outage That Wasn’t

Thu Sept 25 2025

It’s 2 AM, a deployment is in progress, and suddenly every S3 call fails with "NoSuchBucket. The specified bucket does not exist". Dashboards light up. To leadership, it looks like a full-blown outage. To customers, it’s service disruption. But the truth is simpler — the bucket is gone, misnamed, or never existed in the first place.  More

Lists as Function Interfaces: *args, Mutable Defaults, and the One-Liner Power

Thu Sept 25 2025

Imagine you're running a lemonade stand. Most days, you know exactly how many customers you'll have. But some days are surprises! Python functions face the same challenge—sometimes they know how many arguments they'll get, sometimes they don't.  More

The Secret Life of List Operations: Why Slicing Isn't Free

Thu Sept 25 2025

Imagine you have a bookcase where you store your favorite books. In Python, a list is like that bookcase. But here's the secret: it's a very particular kind of bookcase.  More

The Day My Code Brought Down Black Friday (And How Python Generators Saved My Career)

Wed Sept 24 2025

It was 6:47 AM on Black Friday. I was three months into my first developer job at ShopSmart, clutching my third cup of coffee and watching our website's traffic dashboard climb toward what we hoped would be record-breaking numbers.  More

Efficient Iteration Patterns with Python’s itertools

Wed Sept 24 2025

When you master iterators and generators, you gain control over how data flows through your program. But Python doesn’t stop there. It hands you a toolbox—itertools—packed with ready-made, memory-efficient building blocks for working with data streams.  More

Beyond for loops: Mastering Python's Iterators and Generators

Wed Sept 24 2025

When you're first learning Python, you're taught that for loops are the go-to tool for iterating over a collection of items. And they are! They're simple, readable, and work perfectly for most tasks. However, what happens when your list has a million items? Or a billion? Or what if you're processing a multi-gigabyte file?  More

RequestTimeTooSkewed: The S3 Error That Brings Teams to a Halt

Tue Sept 23 2025

It’s late, your team is pushing a routine update, and suddenly every S3 request fails. Instead of success, you’re staring at an XML block with a cryptic message: The app pushes an object to S3, but instead of a success response, you get...  More

The 2 AM Code Review: A Senior Developer's Awakening

Tue Sept 23 2025

The phone buzzed against Sarah's nightstand with the kind of urgent vibration that every senior developer dreads. Production was down. Users couldn't log in. The error logs were flooding with exceptions, and somehow, it was all pointing back to the user authentication service she'd refactored just six months ago.  More

The Art of Simple Python Lists

Tue Sept 23 2025

A well-crafted list is like a perfectly organized toolbox—every item has its place, you can find what you need instantly, and adding new tools feels natural. Lists are Python's workhorses, simple yet powerful, capable of elegant solutions when handled with intention.  More

The Art of Simple Python Variables

Tue Sept 23 2025

A well-named variable is like a clear sign on a mountain trail—it tells you exactly where you are and where you're going. It carries meaning effortlessly, making your code read like a story that anyone can follow.  More

Error: 503 Slow Down — When Amazon S3 Buckles Under Pressure

Mon Sept 22 2025

Outages aren’t rare; they’re a warning sign of misconfigurations and hidden limits.  More

The Day I Couldn't Explain My Own Code

Mon Sept 22 2025

It was a Tuesday afternoon when my brother asked to see what I'd been working on. He's not a programmer, but he's curious about tech, and I'd been excited to show him this data analysis tool I'd built.  More

The Art of Simple Python Functions

Mon Sept 22 2025

A well-written function is like a craftsman's tool—perfectly suited to its task, reliable in your hands, and beautiful in its simplicity. It does exactly what its name promises, nothing more, nothing less.  More

The Art of Simple Python Loops

Mon Sept 22 2025

There's a quiet elegance in well-written loops. Like a path through a garden, they should guide the reader naturally from beginning to end, each step clear and purposeful.  More

Why Programming Legends Rarely Talked About Comments

Sun Sept 21 2025

When I started researching what programming legends had to say about comments, I expected to find volumes of wisdom about when, where, and how to comment code. What I found instead was... almost nothing.  More

The Secret to Writing Code That Humans Can Understand

Sun Sept 21 2025

You've just finished a brilliant piece of Python code. It works perfectly, a testament to your skill. You close your laptop, proud of your work, and move on to the next task.  More

The Secret Art of Writing Great Python Comments

Sun Sept 21 2025

So, you know how to write a Python comment. You’ve mastered the # and the """. But there’s a vast difference between a comment that’s just there and one that’s genuinely useful.  More

Python Comments - Write Code Humans Can Actually Understand

Sun Sept 21 2025

You’ve written a brilliant piece of Python code. It works perfectly. You close your laptop, proud of your work. Fast forward three months. You reopen the file to add a new feature and suddenly think: “What on earth was I doing here? Why did I do it this way?”  More

The Day I Stopped Repeating Myself in Python

Sat Sept 20 2025

For years, I was a code copier. A control-C, control-V programmer, stuck in a loop of repetition. I'd build a function, and then I'd build another one that did something similar. Maybe I needed to time how long a function ran, or maybe I needed to log its inputs and outputs. So I'd copy a few lines of code from a previous project, paste them into my new function, and hope for the best.  More

Demystifying Python Decorators, Part 2: The Pythonic Way and Advanced Usage

Sat Sept 20 2025

Welcome back! In Part 1, we discovered that decorators are just functions that enhance other functions, and we built one manually using my_function = decorator(my_function). Now we're ready to learn Python's elegant @ syntax and tackle the crucial details that separate amateur decorators from professional ones.  More

Demystifying Python Decorators, Part 1: The Foundational Concepts

Sat Sept 20 2025

If you've spent any time with Python, you've almost certainly seen the @ symbol above a function definition. This is a decorator, a powerful feature that can seem a bit magical at first. But what if I told you that decorators are just a logical extension of a core Python principle you already know?  More

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