One of the easiest ways to extract a subset of elements from an iterable in Python is by applying the concept of slicing. In this post, let’s understand how we can slice through any iterable, i.e, strings, lists, or tuples in order to carve out a subset!

Before we begin, let’s refresh our understanding of how indexing works in Python.

Let’s declare a list which contains all the whole numbers from 0 to 9.

num_list = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

Since Python follows zero based indexing, to access the first element of our list…

Python comes with a lot of built-in data structures like lists, sets, tuples, and dictionaries and because of its simplicity, Python makes it very easy to work with these data structures. In this post, I would like to discuss how to nest these data structures to create sophisticated types for managing data.

Let’s create a list to hold the names of the top three public universities in the USA.

universities = ['UCLA', 'UC Berkley', 'UMich']

While this works well to hold the university names, if we wish to associate additional information with each university such as its ranking, then a…

Three months ago, I started growing chia sprouts in a take-out container on a kitchen towel. Since then, I haven’t looked back.

It started as a means of filling the 8' x 11' void that our balcony was. Or it was the inability to go to a park and sit by a tree because of the COVID-19 pandemic that has been threatening the existence of mankind for a while now. …

How many times have you picked up a new book, hoping to finish it at least this time? Or formulated a 30-day meditation routine to get rid of the chaos in your head? Or tried intermittent fasting in the hopes of becoming skinny?

How often have you tasted success in these ventures and for how long?

James Clear, the author of the New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits, points out what is essentially wrong about the ways we try to change our habits. He says,

Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want…

Only locks in life are what you think you know, but don’t.
― Dennis Vickers

If you want to understand the basics of CocoaPods before jumping to Lockfiles, checkout out this blog. There, I have explained the basics of CocoaPods and why and how you should go about integrating them in your project.

What is Podfile.Lock?

According to CocoaPods.org,

A Podfile.Lock is generated after the first run of pod install, and tracks the version of each Pod that was installed.

You can think of it as a snapshot of exactly what CocoaPods has installed in your iOS project!

I always like to start with a matte base then add shimmer.
— Scarlett Johansson

No, this is not a makeup tutorial. The title makes that loud and clear.

But, we are going to add to our views, what Black Widow adds to her face — shimmer.

As an iOS dev, you must have seen the Shimmer Effect every time you slide to unlock your device. This effect is being widely used by some of your favourite apps, including Facebook and Paytm. It has replaced the generic loader which would appear otherwise when apps would fetch data to be…

WHAT IS COCOAPODS?

According to CocoaPods.org,

CocoaPods is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects. It has over 68 thousand libraries and is used in over 3 million apps. CocoaPods can help you scale your projects elegantly.

This means that it helps us incorporate and manage third party libraries which we can use effortlessly in your project.

But before we try to see it in action, let’s understand why we should use third party libraries in our apps and why should we use CocoaPods to integrate them in our project.

WHY DO WE NEED THIRD PARTY LIBRARIES?

We can look at two of the core software engineering…

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words so here are 13,000

Lottie is a magical library for Android, iOS, Web, and Windows which Airbnb devs have put together that allows us engineers to inculcate beautiful, fluid animations created and curated by designers without having to painstakingly recreate them.