Today I will tell you about the massive success that is whypy3.com. With hundreds of users a day (on the best day when it reached page two of Hacker News and hundreds actually being 103), it has been a tremendous success in the lucrative Python code snippet market. By presenting small snippets of code displaying cool features of Python 3, I was able to single–handedly convert millions (1e^-6 millions to be exact) of Python 2 users to true Python 3 believers.

It all started when I saw a tweet about a cool Python 3 feature I haven’t seen before. This amazing feature automatically resolves any exception in your code by suppressing it. Who needs pesky exceptions anyway? Alternatively, you can use it to cleanly ignore expected exceptions instead of the usual except: pass.

from contextlib import suppress

with suppress(MyExc):
    code

# replaces

try:
    code
except MyExc:
    pass

There are obviously way better and bigger reasons to finally make that move to Python 3. But what if you can be lured in by some cool cheap tricks? And that’s exactly why I created whypy3.com. It’s a tool that us Python 3 lovers can use to try and slowly wear down on an insistent boss or colleague. It’s also a fun way for me to share all my favorite Python 3 features so I don’t forget them.

I was initially going to to do the usual static S3 website with CloudFront/CloudFlare. But I also wanted it to be easy for other people to contribute snippets. The obvious choice was GitHub, and since I’m already using GitHub, why not give GitHub Pages a try? Getting it up and running was a breeze. To make it easier to contribute without editing HTML, I decided to use the full blown Jekyll setup. I had to fight a little bit with Jekyll to get highlighting working, but overall it took no time to get a solid looking site up and running.

After posting to Hacker News, I even got a few pull requests for more snippets. To this day, I still get some Twitter interactions here and there. I don’t expect this to become a huge project with actual millions of users, but at the end of the day this was pretty fun, I learned some new technologies, and I probably convinced someone to at least start thinking about moving to Python 3.

Do you use Python 3? Please share your favorite feature!