Learn a new way to store Docker images on the Google Cloud Platform — We used to store Docker images in the Container Registry on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). However, it’s deprecated now and we should instead store Docker images in the Artifact Registry which is a central location for storing and managing “build artifacts” such as Docker images, Python packages, NPM packages…

Learn different ways to use proxies for web scraping with Splash — In web scraping, we often need to use proxies because of IP blocking or geolocation-sensitive data which means the scraped data can change depending on the geolocations of the IPs making the requests. It is straightforward to specify proxies for regular web scraping. …

Learn a secure way to store your private packages on the Google Cloud Platform — The Artifact Registry of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a central location for storing and managing “build artifacts” such as Docker images, Python packages, NPM packages, and many more. …

Learn a simple way to get data from JavaScript websites — Splash is a JavaScript rendering service developed by Scrapinghub, the same company that develops the popular Scraping framework Scrapy. It is particularly useful for scraping web pages that are created by JavaScript frameworks like Angular, React, Vue, etc. This is challenging if not impossible with traditional web scraping tools that…

Learn to use Nginx for serving static files, SSL/TLS termination, and reverse proxying — Nginx is a popular open-source web server, reverse proxy server, and load balancer. If you are working in the software development industry, you should have heard of it already, even though you may not have had the chance to work with it directly yet. With the advent of Cloud Computing…

Docker — A must-know tool for modern software development — Like virtual machines (VMs), Docker is also a technology for deploying and running applications in isolated environments. However, Docker has the advantage of being more lightweight, more portable, easier to set up, and faster to start, which makes it particularly well-suited for microservices and modern, cloud-native applications. Docker is a…

Get started with the essentials of Lua in 10 minutes — Lua is a lightweight and high-level programming language that is typically employed for scripting purposes. It was designed with the intention to be integrated into other applications and allows developers to extend the functionality of their software by custom scripts. As a Python developer, you may normally not have the…

Learn to deal with specific types of SQLAlchemy exceptions in a professional way — When working with databases using SQLAlchemy, many developers may simply catch the base exception SQLAlchemyError, or worse, the base Python Exception. This is not a good practice because it makes the code work like a black box and we cannot anticipate what types of exceptions can be raised. In this…

Learn to interact with databases in a safe way in Python — SQL Injection is one of the most common and also most dangerous web security vulnerabilities which allows hackers to inject malicious SQL code into unvalidated and unsanitized plain SQL queries. It is also a common issue that new developers overlook. The cause and solution for SQL Injection are actually pretty…