Syntax highlighting for console sessions

Posted on Sat 21 November 2020 • Tagged with snippets, open source • 2 min read

It's a minor annoyance that comes up often in GitHub comments: syntax highlighting for Python console sessions. You want the input code (after the prompt) to be highlighted, but the output (which is generally just text or logs) to remain neutral. Turns out there's a syntax highlighter that does just that.


Schedule the interruption of hung Python processes with signals

Posted on Sat 13 July 2019 • Tagged with python, snippets • 3 min read

A lightweight method to interrupt (hung) Python processes after a set time using the signal library.


Redirect standard out to Python's logging module with contextlib

Posted on Wed 22 May 2019 • Tagged with python, snippets • 5 min read

Python's logging functionality is very nice once you get the hang of it, but many people either disagree or don't bother to use it. Learn how to redirect other people's pesky print statements into your nice logging setup.


Cleaner Spark UDF definitions with a little decorator

Posted on Thu 16 November 2017 • Tagged with spark, python, data, snippets • 3 min read

One of the handy features that makes (Py)Spark more flexible than database tools like Hive even for just transforming tabular data is the ease of creating User Defined Functions (UDFs). However, one thing that still remains a little annoying is that you have to separately define a function and declare it as a UDF. With four lines of code you can clean those definitions right up.