Chapter 2. Infrastructure and Tools

Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.

— Rem Koolhaas

You could say infrastructure is not everything, but without infrastructure everything can be

nothing — be it in the real world or in technology. What do we mean then by

infrastructure? In principle, it is those hardware and software components that allow the

development and execution of a simple Python script or more complex Python

applications.

However, this chapter does not go into detail with regard to hardware infrastructure, since

all Python code and examples should be executable on almost any hardware.

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Nor does it

discuss different operating systems, since the code should be executable on any operating

system on which Python, in principle, is available. This chapter rather focuses on the

following topics:

Deployment

How can I make sure to have everything needed available in a consistent fashion to

deploy Python code and applications? This chapter introduces Anaconda, a Python

distribution that makes deployment quite efficient, as well as the Python Quant

Platform, which allows for a web- and browser-based deployment.

Tools

Which tools shall I use for (interactive) Python development and data analytics? The

chapter introduces two of the most popular development environments for Python,

namely IPython and Spyder.

There is also Appendix A, on:

Best practices

Which best practices should I follow when developing Python code? The appendix

briefly reviews fundamentals of, for example, Python code syntax and

documentation.