Whenever you start a project in Python you probably want to do it in a fresh environment so as not to have your dependencies clash with those of other projects, prevent version mismatch or other unexpected breakage. The way to do this is by using virtual environments. As far as I know there are several ways to do this in Python (as always…) but the most prevalent, it seems to me, is using the builtin venv module....
A tale as old as time: you configure and tweak your personal machine that you use for work, coding, fun and games or whatever and at some point you wonder how you might preserve all those tweaks. Either, you want to back them up (which is always sensible) or you want to transfer to a new machine or want to show them to other people online so they can just download your setup and get going immediately....
A while ago I stumbled across some mention of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey which found that the Rust language has held the spot of most loved programming language since 2016. That seemed interesting to me but I didn’t follow it up in any way. A while later I came across some Rust tutorial videos on one of the YouTube channels I frequently visit and looked into it a bit. Looked pretty involved to me and that was that again....
I recently noticed that using a conda environment can come with a couple inconveniences. For example, since the default Python executable changes when activating conda, this means that the $PATH variable has been modified and some software can not be found anymore. For instance, I can’t call PyMol from command line when in a conda environment because it somehow depends on the Python executable, it seems. I recently installed some software into a conda env, that needs a couple of environment variables to run but which I only really need (or want) when running this software in this conda env because it messes with $PATH and disrupts my workflow otherwise....
How to choose a (desktop) operating system and why you should care in the first place