I like the basic script template that the author provides.

However, when I start development of new code I always use a script that starts off with traceback and pdb, something like this:

    #!/usr/bin/env python

    import traceback
    import pdb
    import sys

    def main():
        # some WIP code that maybe raises an exception
        raise BaseException("oh no, exception!")
        return 0

    if __name__ == "__main__":
        try:
            ret = main()
        except:
            traceback.print_exc()
            pdb.post_mortem()
        sys.exit(ret)

This means that whenever an uncaught exception gets raised, I immediately get told what happened (full backtrace) plus I get dumped into the debugger, from where I can inspect why this happened. I liberally sprinkle assert()s through my code, so this gives me a good edit-run-debug cycle to work with.