Hi! I'm Víctor López, long time software engineer. In this blog I share the progress on the development of Python.cards.
A couple of days ago, dozens of users started joining Python.cards, and I was completely confused as to where they were coming from. I Googled, checked Hacker News, searched Twitter, with no luck.
Almost a day later, I found the source: we were featured in Issue 626 of PyCoder's weekly newsletter!
Welcome to all the new Pythonistas who joined, it's good to have you here!
At the end of my second video working on the pathlib deck, this funny moment happened in which I was pretty confused at why this was not working:
>>> from pathlib import PurePath
>>> pattern = PurePath("*.py")
>>> PurePath("hello.py").match(pattern)
It turns out, matching a path to a path and not to a string is something that is only possible since Python 3.12, but this is not documented anywhere! It is not stated in the docs, and as far as I can tell, it wasn't included in the Python 3.12 release notes either.
This led to my first issue reported on the CPython project, which was quickly picked up and hopefully will result in a clarification on the docs.
Python documentation is sublime overall, and the issue I found is obviously not critical. However, I'm very happy because finding these kinds of issues means that we are really distilling the pathlib module functionality into the deck of cards, and we are being faithful to the title: pathlib in depth.
Today I uploaded the first video in which I start to create the first deck on pathlib.
I decided to start with pathlib because it is a very useful module that makes sense to learn in isolation and which is very well suited for spaced-repetition learning.
Even though the module is almost 10 years old, it is sometimes less known due to the old alternatives (mostly os.path), which may seem to make it redundant. The truth is that pathlib is very powerful, fixes a lot of inconsistencies in the previous API, and offers a very neat way of managing paths and files.
Make sure to subscribe to my Youtube channel to keep track of the new additions to this and new decks, and to follow the development of Python.cards.
Spaced repetition is the practice of learning with flashcards reviewed at increasingly longer intervals.
The logic behind it is that when you are first exposed to a piece of information, you are prone to forget it quickly, but revisiting it you will remember it for longer periods, and thus it's not necessary to review it as often.
This approach is widely used to learn new languages, and multiple scientific studies have proven it to be extremely effective.
This is all cool, but I was a bit of a skeptic. The reason is that people learning with Anki were generally extremely motivated and were spending a lot of time creating their decks, and these are the kind of people who are good at learning, with or without spaced repetition.
I needed proof, subjective proof, and I found it.