I try to follow the code-as-text practice and place whitespace between "paragraphs" of code, which ease up readability (after all, no one likes to read huge chunks of text) and help me convey my meaning.

My understanding of whitespace in Python is that it enforces bracing style, rather than split the code into logical parts. And brace style tends to be more of a Holy-Wars issue than "Best-Practices" one.

What do you do if you have engineers on a project who each prefer a different style?

That's why we have project leader/administrator/head for. Style is irrelevant as long as its consistent, and part of a project admin's job is to force consistency