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The posts I'd point you to first. Each one takes a single idea and works through it step by step.

def _build_frequency_map(self, content: bytes) -> dict[int, int]:    """        Build the frequency map by counting how many times each byte appears in the content.     :param content: The source content bytes.    :return: A frequency map dictionary.    """    with utils.Timer(name="Build frequency map", logger=self._logger):        frequency_map = defaultdict(lambda: 0)        for byte in content:            frequency_map[byte] += 1        return frequency_map

Python

Introduction to Huffman Trees

How Huffman coding trees compress data, and how to build a small compression tool with one in Python, from counting characters to writing the bits to a file and reading them back.

July 2026
7 min read
Python

Introduction to MCP Servers and writing one in Python

What Model Context Protocol servers are, what they're useful for, and how to write one in Python and test it with an LLM.

July 2025
7 min read
Python

Testing Tips: Avoid sleep in tests

Waiting with sleep makes a test suite slower with every test you add. Poll with a timeout instead, shown with a small Go example of a tip from Software Engineering at Google.

July 2022
3 min read
Go

Improving the throughput of a Producer ✈

Four ways to speed up a Go service that sends Kafka messages to an HTTP sink. Request batching alone took it from 100 to about 4,000 messages a second.

August 2021
3 min read
Go

from contextlib import contextmanager@contextmanagerdef simple_context_manager(function):    try:        print("calling function")        yield function    finally:        print("function call has ended")class SimpleContextManager:    def __init__(self, cb):        self.cb = cb    def _intercept(self, *args, **kwargs):        print(f"calling with {args} {kwargs}")        return print(*args, **kwargs)    def __enter__(self):        print("intercept start")        return self._intercept    def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb):        print("intercept end")def main():    with simple_context_manager(print) as print_func:        print_func("hi")    with SimpleContextManager(print) as print_func:

Python

Context Managers and Cross Cutting concerns in Python

Python context managers work a lot like decorators, which makes them a neat way to add caching, logging and error handling around code without mixing those concerns into it.

March 2021
3 min read
Python

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