Advice

Everything I've learnt about writing good Python code

In the past 6 months, I've 10xed the amount of python code I've written. In this article, I'll show you a few easy actionable tips to write better and more maintainable code. I've been lucky enough to have Jason (@jxnlco on twitter) review a good chunk of my code and I've found that these few things have made a massive difference in my code quality.

1. using the @classmethod decorator
2. learn the stdlib
3. write simpler functions
4. being a bit lazier - earn the abstraction
5. decouple your implementation

Learning with Adult Responsibilities

Introduction

Over the past 6 months, I've been trying to learn more about AI and LLMs. ChatGPT had me hooked when I tried it for the first time. Over the course of this period, I've been chatting to more people, shitposting on twitter and working to learn as much as I can in my spare time.

That amounts to roughly 10-20 hours a week since I don't have much of a social life which has been about 4-500 hours in total since the time I started exploring this space so take my experience with a grain of salt. I'm relatively new and you're probably 2-3 months behind me at most, much less if you do it full time.

I've had some people reach out to me for advice on what to do and I figured I'd write a longer blog post so that I could refer to it myself and consolidate some of my ramblings.