What this blog is about

Write Better Python? Maybe the title sounds a little pretentious when there are a number of justifiably well known folks in the Python community writing and presenting on the same topic. So just a few words of explanation: at the turn of the century, I was a devoted Python enthusiast. It was was basically the early days of Python 2. I wrote lots of code, I developed a Python course for a well known training company, I served as a tech editor for the second edition of an iconic Python book, and had a draft of my own Python book in the works.  And then I took a very busy job that was not at all Python-focused, and after about 11 years, a second one. Python for the odd tool here and there? Sure. But Python was no longer a focus for me, due to time pressures.

I taught my last instance of my Python course in January 2002.  15 years later in January 2017 I've dug back into the language and I found a lot of things I'd done were pretty simplistic - maybe not exactly "writing C in Python", but on that kind of level, not really expressing things in a modern Pythonic way.

The purpose of the blog is to write about interesting Python aspects as I discover things that have happened in the decade and a half where I've not been able to pay very much attention. This is much more about my own voyage of discovery  than trying to outdo any of the luminaries. I'll be looking at what it means to be "Pythonic", where some refactoring can make more readable code, when to apply the EAFP (Easier to Ask Forgiveness Principle - yes, it's even been given a name) and more. Even though my main objective is to understand things better by writing them up, I hope this material will prove useful to some others!