Here’s a nice short function for flattening irregular lists in Python that I found on Stackoverflow a few weeks back. It returns a generator so should work fine for very big lists.

def flatten_list(object_list):
    """
    Flattens a list of objects.
    """
    for element in object_list:
        if isinstance(element, collections.Iterable) and not \
                isinstance(element, basestring):
            for sublist in flatten_list(element):
                yield sublist
        else:
            yield element

I tested it with lists like the following and it did the job: …

I just finished fully automating my entire server stack for my Django app with Ansible and Vagrant (using VirtualBox). One of the reasons I did this is to make my development environment as close to production as possible to hopefully eliminate any surprises when deploying to production. It also allows me to setup a development environment very quickly as I won’t have to deal with manual installation and configuration of different packages. In a team …

I’ve been making quite a bit of improvements and changes to my Django app, GlucoseTracker, lately that the small amount of time I spent creating a deployment script using Fabric had already paid off.

Fabric is basically a library written in Python that lets you run commands on remote servers (works locally as well) via SSH. It’s very easy to use and can save you a lot of time. It eliminates the need to …

I launched my Django app, GlucoseTracker, the beginning of this year and I’ve already added a few new things to it. To notify users about these new features, I used this nice, simple app called django-sticky-messages. It was written by a friend of mine for his Django app, Pool Manager.

The app lets you set the message to display to the users in the Django admin. You can set a start and …

Being able to write Android apps in Python sounded very appealing to me so I decided to try out Kivy, a Python library that lets you do just that.

Kivy actually allows you to run your Python app not just on Android, but on other platforms as well such as IOS, Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX. So it’s also a good option for writing desktop applications. The project seems to be very active and …