Stop Pandas from converting int to float due to an insertion in another column

If you set dtype=object, your series will be able to contain arbitrary data types:

df["int"] = pd.Series([], dtype=object)
df["str"] = pd.Series([], dtype=str)
df.loc[0] = [0, "zero"]
print(df)
print()
df.loc[1] = [1, None]
print(df)

   int   str
0    0  zero
1  NaN   NaN

  int   str
0   0  zero
1   1  None