The No Title^® Tech Blog

For a long time, I have been writing here about Python, Python projects, and Python books. It was one of my first programming languages, and the first one I fell in love with. So much so that I have used it as my go-to option for personal side projects, quick prototyping, and algorithm study. However, my professional life as a software developer has been based mostly on C# and .NET. At first, it felt like an overly verbose version of Python; over time, though, it became progressively more natural to me—so much so that I no longer prefer one over the other.

I recently stumbled upon a situation where I needed to quickly convert a Base64 string coming from a web api and save it into a file in disk in order to inspect its contents. Sure, I could have spun up a small program in C# or Python. But honestly, that felt like an overkill for what was essentially a one-off task. In the past I had used an online Base64 converter for a similar task, so it crossed my mind, but sharing potentially sensitive data with unknown third-party services didn’t feel right. So, I searched for an alternative. Surely, there had to be an simpler, more direct solution.

This is a pragmatic book that presents some of the most important topics about the Python programming language in a concise form, designed to make it easier to find out the most relevant information bits in a context where resources abound and frequently are just too overwhelming.

This time, we are releasing both Optimize Images and Optimize Images X at the same time. The original CLI version now uses temporary files with in-memory buffers, which prevents unnecessary I/O, and also displays more detailed and more useful version information. Optimize Images X, the GUI version, is now compatible with Python3.7+ and has the ability to open or preview a selected image.

So, just 3 days after the first public beta, here we got the second beta for Optimize Images X. It includes an important hot fix for Windows and Linux, and two new usability features.

Just for fun, this month I set myself to start a new Python project. It’s the same as Optimize Images, but with a big X and a nice graphical user interface. It wants to help you reduce the file size of images, and hopefully make your websites load faster.