Many helpful tools available in Python are essential for effective development - some of them are less known, others are way more popular. This article presents class methods and static methods (constructs of Python), conversion from class to dictionary (and vice versa) and metaclasses and their applications. All these things are vital for beginners and mid-senior Python engineers.

The optimal stopping is one of the most important topics in pure (theoretical) mathematics with many impacts in real life. It gives you an optimal pattern of how to approach many situations. It includes hiring a new employee, renting a flat, selling a house, finding your next love or just searching for a parking place. Despite the horrendous name, the underpinning logic is relatively simple.

One of the traditional arguments on avoiding using ORM is the lack of performance. Although it is generally speaking correct, there are many ways to write queries in your application. Some of them are better (faster and more efficient) than others. There is almost always a way to significantly increase the performance of an application without avoiding the ORM approach. We anticipate some preliminary knowledge of Django and SQL here (so make sure you understand basic concepts before continuing).

There are many interesting use-cases for generating static websites. They reach from a specific website (like documentation) to a general-purpose application (like cached images of e-shops, blogs, etc.). The main advantage of a static website is the simplicity of the product, almost no requirements to infrastructure (even GitHub can host them) and security. Many technologies help to generate static websites, from complex frameworks to simple generators.

One of the typical challenges when exporting numerical computations is how to include the way the calculations were achieved. Typically, if results should be in an Excel sheet, you want to see a formula if you click on each cell. A naive method is using some Excel driver (like XlsxWriter) directly. But if you are dealing with a big Excel sheet (or multiple sheets in one file), this approach becomes quite inconvenient. Therefore, this article presents a library called Portable Spreadsheet - it can easily export defined formulas in Python to many formats, including Excel and JSON.

Frameworks for organizing work - you cannot avoid it whenever you decide to manage a project in IT. What is the most effective way for organizing the work of your team? Probably none of the issues related to project management is covered by so many posts, videos on YouTube, articles in scientific journals. This article is about one concrete human perspective on project organization. It can help you decide how to run your project, consider available frameworks (particularly Waterfall, Agile and SCRUM frameworks), and present management tools.

One of the common challenges of on-demand large datasets processing is the time required for data processing. The naive approach computes operation results on the same component as serves results (and horizontally scale the system when overloaded). The more complex (and generally speaking the only correct) approach is to use some asynchronous task queue based on distributed message passing (message broker). Another option is to stream data continuously as they come.