Hello, I am Waylon Walker.

Here are three things that I see my non programming counterparts doing every single day. These really sum up so much of what folks do within an office.

Installing miniconda from only the command line can be a bit of an intimidating task your first time. Lets walk through how to do it.

It's a really cool GitHub action that will automatically commit files changed during the action. I was using this to render a new readme based on a template.

I was particularly inspired by @chantastic episode 103 of the react podcast with @ParissAthena. They spoke about the black tech pipeline as well as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Pariss is quite an inspiration. She has done so much work to create a better place for POC in tech. I like that not only is she helping them get jobs but acting as a mentor for their first few months on the job to make sure that they are able to find their place and fit in.

If we take a look at the release notes I see one **major** feature improvement on the list, auto-discovery of hooks.

As I continue to build out https://waylonwalker.com/ I sometimes run into some errors that are not caught becuase I do not have good testing implemented. I want to explore some integration testing options using GitHub actions.

When learning a new skill it's important to practice along the way. In order for me to show up to practice I need to make it easy to show up. An easy way to show up to practice with python is to use an online repl. With these you can try out something quick. Sometimes I see snippets from blogs or tweets and I need to try the out for myself to really understand.

I recently added a button to my blog, and subsequently my posts on [DEV.to](https://dev.to/waylonwalker). It's the best thing that I have done for it in a while.

When first learning to code its very common to hard code everything right into the code. This happens with most folks in just about any language. Whether its html or markdown for front end content, or even hardcoding parameters in our backend languages like python, or node.js.

I am looking into a way to replace my google reader experience that I had back in 2013 before google took it from us. I am starting by learning how to parse feeds with python, and without much previous knowledge it proved to be much easier than anticipated thanks to the `feedparser` library.

Can someone explain how or why twitter cards render differently from device to device? I do understand that twitter cards a built from meta tags, the full list can be found in their

Python `*args` and `**kwargs` are super useful tools, that when used properly can make you code much simpler and easier to maintain. Large manual conversions from a dataset to function arguments can be packed and unpacked into lists or dictionaries. Beware though, this power **can** lead to some really unreadable/unusable code if done wrong.

kedro 0.16.2 just dropped last week with a long-awaited feature... catalog search! I went as far as monkey patching this into each of my projects. I work jump between a few really big projects that have tons of datasets. Being able to quickly search for what I need is so useful.

This day 8 years ago I started my first day as a Mechanical Engineer. I am so grateful for this journey that I have been able to have. There is no way that I could have planned this journey from the beginning.

Passing inputs into kedro is a key concept. Understanding how it accepts a single catalog key as input is quite trivial that easily makes sense, but passing a list or dictionary of catalog entries can be a bit confusing.

I just did a quick refactoring of my JAMStack blog urls. Some didn't fit with my style, some had `_` that I wanted to switch to `-`, and others were rediculously long. I've been using forestry as my CMS, I write many of my posts there, and sometimes it picks some crazy file names (based on my titles). It was time to refactor.

It's been a long time coming. We use some very harsh language within tech so much sometimes that we become numb to it. It's time to do my very small part in this movement and purge this language from my active repos starting with this blog right here.

Python `*args` and `**kwargs` are super useful tools, that when used properly can make you code much simpler and easier to maintain. Large manual conversions from a dataset to function arguments can be packed and unpacked into lists or dictionaries. Beware though, this power **can** lead to some really unreadable/unusable code if done wrong.

This is my journey to building up the community page.

I recently discovered the ✨ awesomeness that is pre-commit. I steered away from it for so long because it seemed like a big daunting thing to set up, but really it's easy. It will automatically run checks for you. In some cases, it will even automatically fix them for you. Out of the box, it will do things like automatically trim extra whitespace, fix file endings, and ensure file sizes are not too large for git.

kedro-static-viz is out with support for the newly released hooks feature. This means that you can have `kedro-static-viz` automatically deploy a full gatsby site `before_pipeline_run` keeping your visualization always up to date.

There are two main ways to create kedro hooks, with modules and classes. Each one still uses the same verbiage as the function/method names. Class hooks seem a bit special as they give you a way to configure them so that they are a bit more generally useful.

This post is a 🧠 branstorming work in progress, I will likely use it as a storage location/brain dump of hook ideas.

I want to incorporate some of the wonderful comments, 💕, 🦄, and 🔖's that I have been getting on dev.to on my website. I have dabbled once or twice with no avail this time I am taking notes on my journey, so follow along and let's get there together. By the end of this post, I will have a way to get comments from posts on the client-side thanks to the wonderfully open dev.to API.

GitHub actions can give you confidence that your site is up and running, with the latests JavaScript packages, does not have broken links, and can even take screenshots of what your website looks like on different screen sizes and operating systems.

Kedro provides an efficient way to build out data catalogs with their yaml api. It allows you to be very declaritive about loading and saving your data. For the most part you just need to tell Kedro what connector to use and its filepath. When running Kedro takes care of all of the read/write, you just reference the catalog key.

dead simple docstring coverage for your python project

I always struggle to find a good reference of ascii characters. This is a compilation of my most wanted ascii characters.

Kedro Hooks Intro - kedro hooks are an exciting upcoming feature of kedro `0.16.0`. They allow you to hook into `catalog_created`,`pipeline_run`, and `node_run`(nouns). With a `before`, or `after` (adjective). This really reminds me of reacts lifecycle hooks, that let you hook into various state of react web components. This is going to make kedro so extendable by the community. I am super pumped to see what the community is able to do with this ability.

kedro is an amazing project that allows for super-fast prototyping of data pipelines, yet yielding production-ready pipelines. find-kedro enhances this experience by adding a pytest-like node discovery eliminating the need to bubble up pipelines through modules.

Often when reading through javascript examples you will find some arrow functions use parentheses `()` while others use braces `{}`. This key difference is that parentheses will implicitly return the last statement while braces require an explicit return statement. It is important to understand the difference between them because it is likely that you will find code examples of both and trying to edit code written differently than you're used to may have unintended consequences.

This past week I had a really weird bug in my [kedro](http://kedro.readthedocs.io/) pipeline. For some reason data running through my pipeline was coming out completely made no sense, but if I manually request raw data outside of the pipeline it matched expectations.

So often I see a variables `type()` inside of its name and it hurts me a little inside. Tell me I'm right or prove me wrong below.

One useful action that you can utilize no matter what content your repo has is sending email.

GitHub actions use YAML to configure your workflows. What gets ran, When it runs, What it runs on. Let's discuss YAML and the structure needed for GitHub actions.

GitHub actions are an amazing tool that allows us to run code based on triggers inside of our repo. Their is a large and growing community of actions inside the marketplace to use with very little effort. Best of all they are free for public repositories, and private repos have a very generous free tier.

Sometimes we get a little `git add . && git commit -m "WIP"` happy and mistakenly commit something that we just cant figure out. This is a good way to figure out what the heck has changed on the current branch compared to any other branch.

Getting up and going with a brand new [kedro](kedro.readthedocs.io) project is super simple, thanks to the help of the `kedro new` command. The ability to add an example pipeline from the start makes it that much easier to get going and have a template to follow for your own projects.

What is YOUR Advice for New Data Scientists

Do you have any use cases that you use hoising? Why? It seems like a really cool feature in any language that uses it, but I dont really notice it in use.

Kedro is an open source data pipeline framework. It provides guardrails to set your project up right from the start without needing to know deeply how to setup your own python library for data pipelining. It includes really great ways to manipulate `catalogs` and `pipelines`. This article will cover the 10K view of kedro, future articles will dive deper into each one.

Getting a custom scrollbar on your site makes it stand out a bit compared to the very plain stock one that are on most sites. This is how I set mine up on my gatsby site.

Stick to what you know, and learn a little bit of something new every day.

I documented the story of my 2020 waylonwalker.com redesign on my blog. This post walks through the tools and inspiration for the card design.

It was so easy to get a professional looking navbar with just 3 lines of code. This thing is so usable on mobile.

I finally fixed my Styled-Components in gatsby.js

Should I switch to Zeit Now. Netlify build times are starting to creep in.

git config --global push.default current

Out of Space! How to remove 65 conda environments in one command.

Personal URL shortener with Netlify Redirects

Add helpful cli to your python libraries... All of them!

cmd.exe tips

Add an rss feed to your Gatsby Site

What is something that you recently learned that you wish you would have learned or understood earlier?

I have been using oh-my-zsh successfully for about 2 years now. But lately my startup time has been really bothersome. It has grown to the point where it was taking about **5.5s** to startup a shell! This is ok if I am going to spend some time in here for awhile and do some work that benefits from all of the autocompletions, plugins, and shortcuts that oh-my-zsh brings. But to only jump in to run a handful of commands is infuriating.

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What DataScientists Should Know About S3

Quick Progress Bars in python using TQDM

Autoreload in python

Reimagining my tmux configuration inside of vscode.

My git workflow based on real life. Its not always clean and simple.

Creating Posts from forestry.io.

How to setup a data science project in python.

This is my story into data science.

2019 goals

happiness in the workplace

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