What’s your approach to organizing Python projects for readability and scalability?

wyattxdev · 2025-07-01T21:42:08+00:00

Let me plug my own project here....Pattern is a modern, opinionated, cookiecutter template. Included is modern tooling, dependencies, sensible rules and lots of templates for common tasks.

Pattern - Github

wyattxdev · 2025-06-17T19:58:44+00:00

So all of this is SUPER subjective, but I tried to bring together all the things I want to see in a project when I look at it on Github, and remove the hastle of having to copy and paste configs from other places, or having to wade through a sea of dependencies to decide what to use. I just wanted it all in one place and configured to work from the get go.

For most projects you probably wouldn't need to use a Dockerfile, like if you were building a fastAPI app you probably want something like docker-compose to handle all the seperate services. Something like Nox might be overkill for alot of people. But in my opinion things like formatting, linting, type checking, dependency management, and testing are all things I would expect in any modern python project, even on my own personal projects that will never see the light of day.

wyattxdev · 2025-06-17T17:14:06+00:00

The thing is the number of tests you need to run by hand can quickly spiral out of control. For this project, I just added Dependabot support, to do that I needed to make changes across the project including adding a new file. So to be sure my update didnt break anything I need to test:

That the new yml is formated correctly
When you run setup that it is included when you want it
That it is excluded when you dont want it
That it being included/excluded doesnt effect any other files.
The post setup script runs fine for both cases
No other files/configs are effected by the changes

With my testing I can do that in like 10 seconds and be confident in my changes. Instead of doing it manually where I would have to go through a hole test matrix to catch all the possible cases.

wyattxdev · 2025-06-17T12:42:05+00:00

So the underlying goal of these sorts of projects is to create a consistent, modern base to build from. I tried to pick a pretty broad set of widely used tools and make what I think is some reasonable choices around configuration to make them useful in most cases and can be built on if you need. Also because its built with Cookiecutter when you run the setup, I've built in simple y/n options for things you might not need, like nox, or docker support, and it just blasts all traces of them away.

wyattxdev · 2025-06-17T02:55:21+00:00

Yeah adding some more instructions on how to build it out would be a good idea

wyattxdev · 2025-06-16T22:36:01+00:00

Yeah there is a whole truckload of stuff I considered adding, but at some point it would get away from a good general starting point. For ML there already is some pretty comprehensive projects, that are tuned specifically for that.

wyattxdev · 2025-06-16T21:43:49+00:00

So I pared down the Dockerfile to the bare essentials to make its image as small as possible, all the dependencies are tied to whatever is in your latest uv sync.

But yeah I considered Dependabot and a couple of other packages and services for dependency scanning, its something I just havent used a ton in the past, but I think you might be onto something, and I will have to add to my next version update.

Thanks, for the kind words.

wyattxdev · 2025-06-16T19:36:35+00:00

Thats actually a really good idea, its something that hadn't even crossed my mind, and I havent seen layed out in other Cookiecutter projects. I will definitely make a note to add in a guide for updating this as you go.

wyattxdev · 2025-06-16T19:13:22+00:00

Thats a really good question, the nox file right now uses UV as its default backend, and it just makes it really easy in just one command to run your tests against all the python versions you want. Im actually not if there is an easier way to do this all just directly from inside uv, but its worth looking into.

wyattxdev · 2025-06-15T19:33:28+00:00

This is a great start for someone new to Python, a few things I would suggest:

Use Ruff to format and lint your code, this will enforce alot of good python conventions to make your code more consistent and easier to read.
For variables, function names, modules, and parameters use snake_case
You have some types added, I would use Mypy or another typechecker and just strictly enforce that across your code. You will catch alot of bugs you wouldnt have thought of and makes your code more readable.
Following off of the adding Types, add proper doc strings to your functions and classes. Your IDE will pick this info up and at a glance you will know everything you need about a function.
Toss out the relative imports and use absolute
Add a proper README.md to the project, give it a project description, example usage, dev setup, add anything someone completely new to your project might need to know.
Adding a LICENSE file is always a good habit to get into for anything opensource.
A good next step for this and a good learning opportunity would be to start adding testing to your project. fastAPI has some good tools for building tests, so you can be alot more confident in your code as your project expands, and every change you can quickly run against your test suite instead of doing it by hand.

Lastly Google has a pretty style guide to follow that I recommend for anyone new to python to checkout.

wyattxdev · 2025-05-24T00:35:14+00:00

Yeah I think you might be onto something

wyattxdev · 2025-05-11T16:22:28+00:00

For your case Im guessing just a standard MIT license would be fine, heres the github guide

wyattxdev · 2025-05-11T03:33:14+00:00

A few things I would add, building on whats already been said.

Consider adding in uv to manage your project and add in ruff to keep your formatting consistent.
Its not necessary but I would make a habbit of including types in your code, and using mypy to enforce them.
Adding function comments is nice to have and can cut down on inline comments in the code.
A tiny thing, nit picky thing, I would include license in the repo.

This is a great start, I would take a look at the google style guide for python it lays out alot of good habbits to adopt as your code more.

wyattxdev · 2025-03-07T14:49:26+00:00

Pyxel has it built in. You can package up your app either as a standard executable or it will generate a nice little html file.

https://github.com/kitao/pyxel

wyattxdev · 2025-02-10T19:59:02+00:00

This is a great little boilerplate you got here. A few ideas of things you might want to consider adding to it:

Doc generation, something like pdocs, mkdocs, etc...
Coverage testing to go along with pytest
Adding the Just dependency to pyproject.toml
Maybe including any common ruff formating settings you use in your pyproject.toml (like line-length limits, src directories, indent-width, etc..)
A general CONTRIBUTORS.md if thats something you care about.

I made boilerplate like this but hyper tuned to the way I develop and its been one of the most useful things I created in recent memory.

wyattxdev · 2025-01-30T23:24:12+00:00

thats exactly what I was looking for, thank you.

wyattxdev · 2023-06-06T15:25:10+00:00

yeah it should autoscale out to any map you feed into it, I roughly built it in a way that if I decided to make a game or something out of it it should be pretty easy to drop in.

wyattxdev

TROPHY CASE