If you've heard developers or tech leads talk about "shifting left", it may sound like some kind of command-line trick. But in reality, "shift left" is a mindset - and it's becoming increasingly important in modern software development.
Whether you're writing Python or any other language, understanding this approach can help you build more reliable code, find bugs earlier, and ship faster.
Before diving into Shift Left, which emphasizes catching bugs, performance, and security issues early in the software development lifecycle, it’s important for new programmers to learn the foundational paradigms that support this philosophy.
These paradigms teach early thinking, good code hygiene, and automation - all of which are building blocks of effective software engineering.
Sometimes, you may want to retrieve a specific file from another branch in a Git repository without switching branches completely. This is particularly useful when you want to grab a specific version of a file for debugging, rollback, or review.
In this guide, we’ll walk through how to checkout a single file from another branch using Git. We’ll cover multiple scenarios with examples and best practices.
Measuring how long your Python code takes to run is a critical skill for performance optimization, profiling, or benchmarking different approaches to solving a problem. Python offers many tools for tracking the execution time of a function - from simple built-in methods to full-blown profilers.
In this guide, we will explore multiple methods with code examples to help you choose the right one for your use case.
Ubuntu, like other Debian-based systems, uses .deb files as the standard package format. While most software is installed via apt or the Ubuntu Software Center, sometimes you may need to install software manually using a .deb file you downloaded from a website or built yourself.
In this article, we’ll cover how to install .deb packages using the GUI and command line, how to resolve dependencies, and best practices for safe installation.
Processing media files inside AWS Lambda can be a challenge due to its resource limits, lack of a local disk, and timeouts. However, it’s entirely possible to stream files directly from S3 into FFmpeg, process them on the fly, and avoid writing anything to disk.
In this guide, we’ll cover:
ffmpeg with stdin and stdout in memory/tmp bottlenecksmsgspec is a high-performance serialization library designed for modern Python applications. It combines type-safe data modeling, blazing-fast parsing, and flexible support for multiple serialization formats, including MessagePack, JSON, and TOML.
This article outlines the best practices for integrating msgspec into your codebase. It provides a practical, performance-oriented guide to writing cleaner, safer, and faster Python services.
Off-by-one errors (OBOEs) are among the most common logic bugs, even for seasoned developers. These bugs occur when a loop or operation goes one iteration too far or one iteration too short-leading to incorrect results, missed elements, or crashes.
They usually occur in:
Have you ever counted your toys and accidentally said you had 11, but really only had 10? That’s kind of what an off-by-one error is in Python!
It’s a tiny mistake where your program counts 1 too many or 1 too few. These mistakes are super common, even for professional programmers.
msgspec is gaining attention in the Python ecosystem due to its incredible speed and minimalist design. It's written in Rust, supports JSON and MsgPack, and uses type hints for validation. But like every tool, it’s not perfect - and when compared to the battle-tested and feature-rich Pydantic, there are several key trade-offs to be aware of.
In this article, we’ll explore what msgspec lacks compared to Pydantic, illustrated with code examples and practical reasoning.