I was working on a project where I needed to highlight certain thresholds in a chart. The data was from a survey on average working hours across US states, and I wanted to show benchmarks with labeled horizontal lines. At first, I thought Matplotlib would have a direct option to add labeled horizontal lines. But … Read more >>
If you’ve ever worked with Matplotlib in Python, you might have encountered the warning: “Matplotlib is currently using agg, a non-GUI backend.” I’ve faced this issue many times during my data visualization projects, especially when running scripts on servers or headless environments. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through what this message means, why it … Read more >>
When I first started working with Python dictionaries, I often needed to create a copy but exclude one or two keys. At first, I thought Python would have a built-in method for this. However, just as in Excel, where you sometimes need a workaround, in Python, you also need to employ different techniques. Over the … Read more >>
I still remember the first time I plotted a line chart in Python using Matplotlib. It looked fine, but when I tried to add a dashed line, the spacing didn’t look the way I wanted. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through everything I’ve learned about controlling dashed line spacing in Matplotlib. I’ll show you … Read more >>
As a developer working on a data visualization project, I needed to create clear and informative line plots to present some trend analysis. As I’ve discovered over my years working with Python, Matplotlib is incredibly useful, yet sometimes the basics can trip us up. In this article, I’ll walk through several approaches to plot lines … Read more >>
When I first started working with data in Python more than a decade ago, one of the first visualizations I learned was the histogram. In my projects, especially when analyzing survey results or financial data from U.S. clients, histograms became my go-to tool. They helped me quickly identify trends, outliers, and the overall shape of … Read more >>
Recently, while cleaning up some text data for a project, I ran into a common issue: I had to remove a specific substring from strings, but only if that substring existed. At first, I thought there might be a built-in function for this, but Python doesn’t have a single “remove substring if exists” method. Instead, … Read more >>
I was working on a project where I had to clean up messy text data coming from customer feedback forms. Some of these strings contained numbers mixed with words, and I specifically needed to get last number in Python string. At first, I thought there would be a built-in function, but there isn’t. So, I … Read more >>
While working on a project where I had to send structured data from a Python backend to a web application. The data was stored in a nested dictionary, and I needed to convert it into JSON format. The issue is… while converting a simple dictionary to JSON is easy, many people get confused when the … Read more >>
As a developer, I was working on a data-cleaning project where I had to process a large JSON dataset from an API. The dataset represented customer information, but many records contained empty keys that served no purpose. If you’ve ever worked with dictionaries in Python, you know they’re one of the most powerful data structures. … Read more >>