I still have whitespace problems occasionally, though I know they're my fault and come from my bad setup.

Basically, my windows install of Vim and my *nix install are not using the same whitespace settings, and I sometimes have to fix a bunch of lines if I wrote them first in windows.

It happens infrequently enough that I haven't bothered to figure out exactly what the problem is, but I've been coding python for years without drilling this one down.

I do use python for work from time to time (not every day, but probably every week) and I still occasionally have problems with whitespace. It's one of the most annoying things with Python, especially if editing somebody else's code or working in foreign environment (another machine, etc.) where tools aren't configured in your standard way.

PEP8: "Use 4 spaces per indentation level."

If you're getting code from someone else in your company which doesn't, just hit them round the head with PEP8 until they learn.

It's easy to write a PEP, it's less easy to configure every editor in existence to use exactly 4 spaces, especially when normal humans prefer hitting tab once instead of hitting space 4 times.