😄 Hey there!

Happy new year! No “new year, new me” here. We’re full steam ahead with this newsletter (and my other newsletter, Bytes and Brew).

Here’s what’s in store for today:

• A small update to the Python Pantry,

• Using Python’s built-in sum() function to flatten lists,

• And much more…

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🥐 The Python Pantry

Curated links to help you become a better programmer

🎒 Tutorials
- How To Build a Comprehensive Flask REST API in 5 Minutes using Flask-Musk (link)
- A Comprehensive Guide to YAML Using Python (link)

📦️ Packages
- Microdot: a lightweight flask-like web framework (link)
- attrs: Replacement for dunder methods in class definitions (link)

💰️ Job Postings
- Principle Software Engineer. Remote, KS, USA (link)
- Junior Python Developer. Texas, USA (link)

📕 Articles
- Python Gotcha - List Copy Problems (link)
- Hide Those Terminal Secrets using Warp (link)

💡 This Week’s Snack & Challenge

The weekly tip/trick and coding challenge

There’s different ways to flatten lists, from using itertools, numpy, and list comprehension.

But one thing I found very interesting is using the built-in sum function to flatten lists.

Yes, you read that right. Here’s a simple example:

>>> x = [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5]]
>>> x
[[1, 2, 3], [4, 5]]
>>> sum(x, [])
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Here’s why this works:

1. sum takes 2 arguments: your iterable and a start value. Start value defaults to 0.

2. On the first iteration, it takes [] + [1, 2, 3], which results in [1, 2, 3].

3. On the second iteration, it joins the 2 lists together: [1, 2, 3] + [4, 5], resulting in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

While this is a really nifty trick, there’s a few reasons why I wouldn’t use this in any production code:

1. There’s more efficient ways (such as itertools),

2. It’s not clear as to what the code is doing since it’s an unconventional way of expressing list-flattening,

3. You can’t have any other data type except lists as your elements.

For example, sum([[1, 2], 3, [4, 5]], []) won’t work since the second element is an integer, not a list; you can’t add a list to an integer.

Here’s a few alternatives to flatten lists that are more conventional:

1. List comprehension

2. itertools.chain.from_iterable()

3. numpy.flatten()

4. functools.reduce()

5. A simple nested loop 😃 

With this information, give this week’s challenge a shot:

📋️ How I Can Help

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