Adhering to PEP 8 Style Guidelines: Cleaning Up Blogthedata.com Code

Blogthedata.com is coming together! We now have perfect* Google Lighthouse score, open issues[1, 2] to achieve a perfect* Mozilla Observatory score, and 100% unit test coverage.

Now, what about the code style? That's where linting comes in. There are several linters for Python, I use Pylint.

VScode has native Pylint integration. Pylint analyzes your code for several issues including very Pythonic things like ensuring variables conform to snake casing (sorry JavaScript 😆) as well as data structure suggestions such as when it might be better to use a tuple over a list. Most Pylint suggestions are based on Python's famous PEP 8 style guide authored by the great Guido van Rossum.

Now, it's time to spill the beans. I don't 'exactly' have 100% Pylint compliance. I added the following to my VScode settings.json to ignore some Pylint checkers:

# settings.json
{
    "python.linting.pylintArgs": [
        "--disable=C0301",
        "--disable=C0114",
        "--disable=C0115",
        "--disable=C0116",
        "--disable=E0401",
    ]
}

C0301 - Line too Long

I don't like lines being too long, but sometimes code just makes more sense on one line even if it’s long. I do include the following rulers in VScode to see PEP 8's line length guidelines within the editor.

# settings.json
{"editor.rulers": [79, 120]}

Rulers in VScode

C0114, C0115, C0116, (missing class, module, function docstrings)

I am no stranger to documentation. I love documenting things! That being said, I will soon be 'reactifying' blogthedata.com which will drastically change code architecture. Once I split the front and backend of the app, I'll turn these checkers back on so I can crank out documentation.

E0401 - import-error

I haven't quite figured this one out. The error is supposed to be about a failed import, but I’ve run into cases where Pylint says the import is failing, but it's clearing working in my code. I turned the error off until I can figure out why Pylint is confused.

Other than those exclusions, blogthedata.com is Pylint compliant and attempts to follow PEP 8 style guidelines wherever possible.

Get a linter and clean up yo code!