Useful Python Libraries for Startups

http://blog.instavest.com/three-useful-python-libraries-for-startups

by zallarak • 11 years ago

168 46 11 years ago

blog.instavest.com

merb2• 11 years ago

This is extremely subjective.

JustSomeNobody• 11 years ago

True. More so if you come at it from the perspective of "I use C++ at my startup".

If, however, you use Python at your startup it's more interesting, while still somewhat subjective.

skhatri11• 11 years ago

It is quasi-contextual, but it would seem that a lot of startups share the same problems so there is broad applicability.

zallarak6• 11 years ago

Agreed. My goal was to share what I thought were solutions to generally common problems, and were't incredibly easy to find (i.e. > 3 google searches to find). The three libraries I selected were general tasks that lots of developers end up having to re-invent (especially phone number parsing).

craigds• 11 years ago

Is parsing phone numbers really a common task for startups? (I've never needed to do it). Is the use-case just validating that the user didn't accidentally type their phone number incorrectly? (Seems if the user wants to give you the wrong phone number, they can just pick one out of a directory...)

knicholes• 11 years ago

I expected more libraries.

Semiapies2• 11 years ago

Agreed, but I hadn't heard of the first two, so worth the time.

hornbill• 11 years ago

I am curious about why you have to parse dates in different formats. Is it part of a web crawler?

Once I switched to python 3, datetime has been sufficient for my needs as timezone is also handled.

zallarak6• 11 years ago

We worked with a third party API for a data source which had inconsistent formats for dates. Also, we A/B test inputs and its awesome to be able to change how users input dates on the front-end without server-side code changes.

athoik2• 11 years ago

python-requests is a must have!

Requests: HTTP for Humans http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/

pbreit3• 11 years ago

I seem to do fine with httplib/2 and generally prefer core libraries. Am I really missing out on much?

shpx• 11 years ago

https://gist.github.com/kennethreitz/973705

I would say not much, but it's much more pythonic.

dimino• 11 years ago

Python-dateutil is unintuitive as all get-out in my humble opinion, so I recommend dateparser instead (recent release has many great improvements over dateutil, but check it out for yourself to decide [0]).

[0] https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser

rshaban• 11 years ago

Hi @zallarak, nice to see you on HN! Not sure if you're doing any text analytics yet, but NLTK is designed to be super-quick to get up and running.

zallarak6• 11 years ago

Hey, Thanks for the suggestion! I will look into it. Hope you're having a great summer in SF.

apalmer• 11 years ago

Not sure why these recommendations are start up specific. Nothing here seems particularly 'startup'. These are just good simple general purpose web related python libraries.

zallarak6• 11 years ago

I can see that perspective. My thoughts were that each of these were not the "best" way to do things, but provided a great effort/benefit ratio. For example, if you have a very high traffic website, then you're better off using a CDN for static files instead of Whitenoise.

copsarebastards• 11 years ago

If the effort difference between installing nginx and using Whitenoise makes a significant difference in the success of your business, there are much larger hiccups down the road which are going to put you out of business, so you might as well give up now.

duckmysick• 11 years ago

My thoughts were that each of these were not the "best" way to do things

May I ask what's the better way to parse international phone numbers?

tuyguntn2• 11 years ago

If only for testing I would agree with whitenoise, but in case of startup and you are already serving static files why do you want to replace NGINX with Whitenoise? any specific reason for Whitenoise, maybe it is better/simpler/efficient than NGINX?

zallarak6• 11 years ago

Good question. We were not using nginx to begin with (rather, serving it through our app server). It was an alternative to nginx and is super easy to set up: https://github.com/evansd/whitenoise#quickstart-for-other-ws...

tuyguntn2• 11 years ago

If you are using python code for serving static files, probably you are not seeing lots of traffic yet, I guess you should reconsider your decision and watch "Simple made Easy"[1] talk by Rich Hickey

[1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

carapace• 11 years ago

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/whitenoise#infrequently-asked-q...

mangeletti• 11 years ago

Since a lot of startups use AWS, boto ranks up there.

https://boto.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

sandGorgon• 11 years ago

remember that boto3 was released separately - https://github.com/boto/boto3

hayd• 11 years ago

Does boto3 becoming 1.0 last week mean that everyone should be moving to it or will boto3 merge into boto?

zallarak6• 11 years ago

Great point :-)!

caw• 11 years ago

There's also libcloud, which is a unified API https://libcloud.apache.org/

Some AWS specific functions, particularly for newer products or options, aren't always there immediately so you end up having to use boto in those cases. You also sometimes use provider specific options on functions, so it's not totally write-once and ignore.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

Why is "222-222-2222" not a valid phone number?

bdarnell• 11 years ago

The phone numbers library isn't just counting digits; it has a database of which area codes exist (as well as other lesser-known rules, depending on the country). This makes it more effective at filtering out invalid/fake phone numbers, but it does mean you need to stay on top of the latest version as its database changes over time.

bohinjc• 11 years ago

Regarding dates, I would have mentioned Arrow - http://crsmithdev.com/arrow/

fasouto• 11 years ago

https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python

DevPad• 11 years ago

Awesome!

pbreit3• 11 years ago

Not a fan of uncurated, kitchen sink lists like that. Almost worse than no list at all. I know, I know, I don't have to look at it.

welder• 11 years ago

An alternative to phonenumbers is https://www.twilio.com/lookup

bpicolo• 11 years ago

API call vs code not really the same.

anandpdoshi• 11 years ago

Disclaimer: I am one of the developers that built this.

Try Frappe Framework (https://frappe.io). We have received feedback that it is really good to quickly build internal projects or prototypes.

Also ERPNext (https://ERPNext.com) is an open source erp that is feature rich and has a good UI. It can help any startup to manage their business without resorting to complicated excel sheets based management.

athoik2• 11 years ago

Another useful library is vatnumber Python module to validate VAT numbers: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/vatnumber

JelteF• 11 years ago

When I needed a Python generation, I created abstractions between Python and LaTeX. The documentation is far from finished, but it should be fairly understandable with the examples.

Docs: https://jeltef.github.io/PyLaTeX/

Code: https://github.com/JelteF/PyLaTeX

danhardman• 11 years ago

Does anyone have any non-python alternatives to these libraries? A lot of them seem very useful to me, but I rarely work in Python.

truncate• 11 years ago

Every startup gotta deploy stuff. I remember Fabric a useful tool for quickly deploying and automating various tasks - http://www.fabfile.org/. Also not a library, but Gunicorn is pretty quick easy way to setup a quick decent HTTP server over your Python WSGI app.

codesushi42• 11 years ago

Dependency injection: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/injector/0.9.1

For Flask-- it removes the dependency on a global request context: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Flask-Injector

Useful Python Libraries for Startups

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