Preface

This book was produced based on lessons learned while designing products for Bitmast Digital Services Ltd, tutorials for Codeskol’s Bootcamp training, and apps for A17S clients. This book is intended for developers who have some experience of Python programming and a background in web application development using frameworks such as Django or Flask. An effort will be made to teach FastAPI framework fundamentals and demonstrate alternate techniques to completing selected tasks. The notion of online application development utilizing FastAPI will be explained using a Do-It-Yourself method by providing design recommendations for mWallet, a cryptocurrency wallet management system that will use Blockcypher, PayStack, and a currency trading API.

I started working with FastAPI about 2021, after a friend introduced me to the framework. I took a look at it and was honestly struck by the simplicity and excellent documentation. However, upon trying to work on projects with my peers, I realised there were not so many Python web developers in my network and the few who were into Python used Django extensively. FastAPI was great but my community was just not aware of its simplicity and possibly best use cases. In some sense, this was understandable as there was a trend for building web applications in my region. The conventional web application needs user management, some collection of forms, a relational database system to store data and of course an administrative user dashboard. Such features are included in Django but not readily available for microservice frameworks like FastAPI. However, there is indeed a very great use case for FastAPI: microservices and lightweight web applications that can be easily integrated with Python packages like Machine Learning tools. For this, I found it easier to use FastAPI than Django - my personal opinion. In this book, I wish to teach FastAPI and address some business needs common in my region. A number of business cases were considered, and polls taken from an IT community using WhatsApp. From the selection, the topic addressing Payment was selected. To make for a more interesting read, both fiat and cryptocurrency payment systems were selected. The core idea of this book is not to simply discuss a technology, but rather to help programmers learn various skills and tools that can help them build faster and more robust applications, in this case, web applications using FastAPI.

In writing this book, I had in mind an audience of young programmers at beginner or intermediate skill levels of Python programming. The sample code used in this book will be drawn from my experience in training and working on short term projects. My experience in training is drawn from running short tutorials (called Codeskol) for people who are often self-taught or just fiddling with the idea of coding.

One of the challenges of writing this book was addressing how to pass technical skill in a concise manner quickly such that people can access “quick fixes” and still become excellent craftsmen. It really seemed a paradox as becoming a great craftsman demanded intensive focus, enjoying what one does, and gathering experience overtime. Matching that against a tight schedule seemed daunting but that is really what I had to deal with and the motivation behind the 100 PAGES SERIES. This book is an attempt to pass technical information in a “hurry” without people missing out on the key concepts in helping them solve their problems or building a solution and then moving on to something else. Keeping in the style of Codeskol, the topics discussed here are tailored towards building a solution for business needs, and tips gained from developing this solution are presented in here.

I hope the lessons gathered from our programming experience saves you, the reader, lots of hassles in building your own solution(s). Sadly, in some cases, code bases for the solution are not publicly available for multiple reasons peculiar to client’s approval and Nigerian Intellectual Property needs. Nevertheless, I have provided some snippets and I hope this makes a great read. The reader should note that some examples used in this book may not match actual code in the actual repository. The code in this book were modified to suit a given concept or idea being explained. Furthermore, using actual code base could introduce topics outside the scope of this book.

How the book is organised

The focus of this book is to help gain skills in using FastAPI. With that in mind, I have attempted to showcase tips from experience in building a project using FastAPI. Each Chapter will focus on an aspect of the selected project with highlights on design considerations, Software Engineering skills, or related information that may come in handy during a real life project. All code snippets will be based on Python 3.10 or later. The preferred database Object Relational Mapper (ORM) used in this book is the SQLAlchemy (version 2.0 or later) and sample code will use both the Core and ORM functions of SQLAlchemy.

The convention used in this book are as follows:

Code blocks are generated using the monokai pygments style. Example:

from wallet import services

async def generate_wallet(user: str | uuid.UUID) -> Any:

    return services.generate_wallet(user)

As this book was generated using markdown, links to resources may be formatted using my default rendering engine and not in the common blue colour with underlined text. See example link below with the word “bitmast” as a link:

visit bitmast directs you to web page at URL http://bitmast.co

Quotes in each chapter will be provided in various sections of each chapter. Example:

FastAPI is a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.7+ based on standard Python type hints.

📚 Further Reading

The further reading section will provide links to articles, videos, or other resources which a reader may explore to better understand a topic. Further Reading may be inserted at different positions of a page but more often at the end of the topic. This was done to reduce the number of times a reader may leave a page to view more information. Sections on further reading are provided as block quotes.

🔍 Zoom in

Certain concepts may be further explained in the Zoom in section. Zoom in sections may appear across different sections of the page. The Zoom in section is often shorter than further read and aims to provide a more elaborate explanation of a concept or technique.

While care has been taken to showcase a reasonable amount of information to help developers across various chapters, the RESOURCES chapter covers a variety of Software Engineering and business topics in building web applications (apps) using Python in general and FastAPI in particular. Overall, I hope information contained in this book provides meaningful tips to any developer in any environment but at the moment of writing this book, I had the Nigerian ICT environment in mind.

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Donations will go towards writing other short text to advance programming skills.