Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

If I throw a coin high up in the air, I know the outcome — it will either be heads or tails. However, I can’t predict which it will be. I will certainly be able to guess with a 50% chance, but I can’t be 100% certain. If I were to roll a die, my certainty becomes less (1 in 6). However, I still know what the output could be. Computers are great at many things, especially predictability. They are deterministic and creating a truly random number is impossible.

Python is a popular and powerful programming language that is often used for building web applications, data analysis, and automation. One of the key challenges in such projects is ensuring the security of network communication, which can be vulnerable to various threats such as man-in-the-middle attacks and eavesdropping. Fortunately, Python offers a range of libraries for encrypting and securing network communication.

DevOps engineers must handle secrets with care. In this series, we summarize best practices for leveraging secrets with your everyday tools.

The Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) Principle is one of Python’s most used software development principles. It aims to reduce the repetition of software patterns and algorithms by using package libraries and boilerplate templates to improve product release efficiency.

As developers, we often write test cases and comments to explain our code. Commenting improves the codebase’s readability and quality. Detailed comments can remind us why we implemented a specific functionality. They can also help other programmers understand, maintain, use, and expand codebases.

Everything on the internet has a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that uniquely identifies it — allowing Internet users to gain access to files and other media. For instance, this article has a unique URL that helps search engine optimization (SEO) crawlers index it for users to find. The first definition of the URL syntax is in the 1994 Request for Comments (RFC) 1738. Since then, the structure of URLs has gone through many revisions to improve their security.

Nowadays, we do virtually everything online: book flights, pay for goods, transfer bank funds, message friends, store documents, and so on. Many things we do require giving out sensitive information like our credit card details and banking information. If a website uses an unsecured network, a malicious hacker can easily steal user information. This is why encryption is so important.

Python is a growing language. As it evolves and expands, so do the number of tools and development strategies available for working with it. One process that’s become increasingly popular is linting — or checking code for potential problems. With linting, errors in our code will be flagged so we can correct unusual programming practices that might result in problems. Linting is performed while the source code is written and before it’s compiled.