pedbad

Tutorials and guides by Pedram Badakhchani, Head of eLearning, full-stack developer and AI engineer, and online tutor on the University of London BSc Computer Science. Written for my students and open to everyone: JavaScript, p5.js, Python, Django, databases, Git and web development. New here? Start with my Start here page.

42 posts

Oct 31, 202612 min read
Physics with matter.js in p5.js
From falling boxes to slingshots
Oct 31, 202615 min read
Random vs Perlin noise in p5.js: from jumpy dots to flow fields
Ten sketches, from simple to challenging, written the way larger projects are written
Oct 19, 20264 min read12 views
Getting started with Django 5.2 LTS using uv
Tested with: uv 0.13.1, Python 3.14.8 and Django 5.2.18 LTS, October 2026. Django 5.2 is the current long-term-support release, with security fixes until April 2028. Looking for my 2021 version with D
Oct 18, 202412 min read166 views
Understanding JavaScript Scope: A Beginner's Guide to Variable Visibility
Updated October 2026. Removed a stray sentence, corrected the point about global variables and memory, and added an example of var ignoring blocks and a section on module scope. The new examples were
Jul 5, 202413 min read106 views
Transforming XML: XML Pipelines
Updated October 2026: the XQuery part has been rewritten. The first version tried to run XQuery with lxml, which can't do that (it supports XSLT 1.0, not XQuery), so that example never worked; it now
Jun 17, 202413 min read146 views
XML: Documents with semantics
Introduction to XML eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a versatile markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. It
May 21, 202422 min read126 views
RESTful APIs with Django and the Django Rest Framework
Part 3 - Using Model Serializers with Django Rest Framework Updated October 2026: re-tested with the original versions (Django 4.2, DRF 3.15.1) and with Django 5.2 LTS and DRF 3.18.3 (see the note in
May 16, 202413 min read111 views
RESTful APIs with Django and the Django Rest Framework
Part 2 - Building RESTful Endpoints from Django Models Updated October 2026: re-tested with the original Django 4.2 versions and with Django 5.2 LTS (see the note and the updated requirements.txt in
May 7, 202423 min read145 views
Exploring the Cosmos: Building and Querying a Planetary Database with MySQL
Updated October 2026: every statement on this page has been re-run on MySQL 8.0 on Linux (the setup used in the Coursera labs), and the output shown is from that run. This update fixes the Moons table