Playful Python May 2022 Round Up

In case you missed any of the content, here is a quick summary of what we've done last month.

The big announcement: Hands-on Exercises

Let's start with the big one: We have now incorporated hands-on projects to our site. You can use these projects to type out code and try out the examples right from your own browser without needing to install anything. This is great for those who don't have python installed on their laptop, but still want to work with the examples. We have started with two hands-on exercises so far, with many more to follow. You can browse the complete list of hands-on exercises here.

Learning PyScript

A major announcement at PyCon US 2022 was the launch of PyScript. Using PyScript, you can write python code and execute it in the browser itself. This announcement has many in the Python community very excited because for the first time you can easily create web UIs for your tool or script. To that end, we brought out a tutorial on how PyScript works accompanied by a six minute youtube video.

Expect more tutorials on PyScript coming up in June and July. We have at least 3 more videos + blog posts on this topic lined up for the next two months.

Learn Functional Programming with Python

There has been a lot of buzz about functional programming (FP) languages over the last few years. Even hardcore OO languages like Java have been rushing to add functional programming features lately (with mixed success). Unfortunately learning FP is extremely intimidating because of the highly mathematical jargon: functors, applicative functions, monoids and the infamous monad are some of the terms thrown about.

But it doesn't have to be that way. We've been putting together a beginners guide to FP that anyone can understand. And Python is a perfect language for this. It supports most features required for FP with an easy to read, easy to understand syntax that everyone is familiar with. The aim of this guide is to learn practical techniques that you can apply into your existing projects.

If you have been itching to learn FP, but have been intimidated to get started, give this guide on functional programming a look through.

Session overviews of PyCon US 2022

Speaking of PyScript, it was announced at PyCon US 2022 last month, but that wasn't the only thing at the event. There were 3 other keynotes plus a number of great sessions on many python features. Type hinting, structural pattern matching, import hooks, you name it.

We have tweeted session overviews of many of the sessions, so you don't need to spend hours watching all the videos or searching through the contents. All our PyCon US 2022 twitter threads have been collected on this page, so it's super easy to see which topics you are interested in and read the relevant twitter thread. Catch up on the latest in the Python community in under half an hour.

Psst: We are on Twitter and Youtube

If you read the previous sections of the roundup, you would have realised that we also have twitter and youtube channels.

We tweet a lot of small, interesting threads about Python on twitter. For example, this one on type hinting

The youtube channel focusses on code walkthroughs, where you can see us actually coding different things in python. We will eventually start doing live coding streams as well (Tentative plan is to start live streams in July, but that might change)

So if you are interested in those kinds of content: follow us on twitter and subscribe to our channel on youtube.

But don't worry, all big pieces of content eventually finds its way to this site and if you are subscribed to the site you will get to know about it.

That's it for May

May was the first full month for the site and it was a month stuffed with content. Building out the hands-on exercise platform within a few weeks of launching the site was an amazing achievement, and honestly, we were pretty exhausted after getting that feature out in front of everyone. But we are super excited just thinking of all the ways that we could take that platform forward and make it even more valuable for all of you. That's all the motivation that we need.