For months now I have been working with data out of Jupyter notebooks in an Anaconda (conda) virtual environment pip installing Python package after Python package, naively unaware of how anything could possibly go wrong with my computer’s ever growing library of PyPI — all until a few conflicts arose and the code I was working with indicated it was dependent on an earlier versions of a packages I had already installed.
If you are beginning to work with data in Python and furiously learning the endlessly growing library of packages that come along with knowledge of Python, here is my word of advice to you: you will save yourself hours of bug fixing and backtracking by knowing how to work with Python virtual environments from the start. If you haven’t already, start by downloading Anaconda. This can take a little while, so go brew yourself a little coffee (or tea!) while it downloads and then you can finish the rest of this blog in about 5 minutes.

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