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May 2026 | 1 posts

How Kedro handles your inputs

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. *args/**args review # [1] Check out this post for a review of how *args **kwargs work in python. understanding python *args and **kwargs [2] python args and kwargs [3] article by @_waylonwalker [4] All Kedro inputs are catalog Entries # [5] When kedro runs your pipeline it uses the catalog to imperatively load your data, meaning that you don’t tell kedro how to load your data, you tell it where your data is and what type it is. These catalog entries are like a key-value store. You just need to give the key when setting up a node. Single Inputs # [6] These are fairly straightforward to understand. In the example below when kedro runs the pipeline it will load the input from the catalog, then pass that input to the func, then save the returned value to the out...

Master No More

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. Large Refactor At The Command Line [1] this post follows my method of refactoring code bases from the command line, read more about that in this article. c-s-f # [2] First off browsing through the content of my blog I found many references to master. I cannot completely whole-sale find and replace each one of them, because some of them are links that I do not own. Any set of instructions got upgraded from master to main - git checkout master + git checkout main There were countless cases of examples like this to comb through, but it feels good to have them purged of old language. rename routes # [3] Following yesterdays post, I am going to rename my markdown files /static/_redirects shorteners # [4] - /gdfm /blog/today-i-lear...
2 min read 💬 4

Refactoring your blog urls

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 ridiculously 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. Large Refactor At The Command Line [1] When refactorings similar to this get really big I often need to do some project wide find an replace, I usually do this right from the command line. 🖊 Rename posts change the filename # [2] My post urls are based on the file name of my markdown file, so I can simply go through my filesystem and rename anything I want. From here its probably best to only commit the addition of the new file name, until the redirects clear, but these are all low traffic posts for me so I just commited both at once. Safely redirect without breaking links _redirects ⤴ /redirects # [3] I am hosted on netlify, which automatically puts very ⚡ ...

understanding python \*args and \*\*kwargs

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. /* h2 {display: block;} */ h2>img { margin: auto; width: 100%;} 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. *args are for lists # [1] *args are some magical syntax that will collect function arguments into a list, or unpack a list into individual arguments. recieving *args # [2] When recieving variables as a *<varname>, commonly *args, the arguments get packed ...
3 min read ↺ 11 💬 3

pre-commit is awesome

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 [1]. 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. Quickstart # [2] It comes with a sample-config that is pretty general purpose and use for just about any project in git. pip instal pre-commit pre-commit s...
4 min read ↺ 6

Building kedro.dev

Follow along the Journey as I build out kedro.dev [1]. Building a Community # [2] I have really enjoyed my own personal journey as I have started to build all of my data pipeline projects with the kedro framework. I want to start building a place to share resources with the community. I want to see this community grow and flourish. They say in front end web development if you are not using a framework you end up building one. That’s exactly what I was doing before I started using kedro. I want to build out a set of resources that this community can learn from and start to use the framework at their own pace without needing to develop their own from scratch. research # [3] Looking into the front end frameworks to see how they welcome their community. Much of my inspiration is from them, bringing lessons learned to data. pages # [4] - banner - nav - docs -> readthedocs - tutorial -> kedro-examples - blog -> medium - community - support - team - courses - examples - mee...
1 min read

Kedro Static Viz 0.3.0 is out with Hooks Support

kedro-static-viz [1] 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. Even though it is a static site there is no functionality lost. The only thing that’s missing is the flask server. With kedro-static-viz [1] you can deploy your visualization to a number of static hosting providers such as GitHub pages free of charge with wicked fast performance ⚡ It’s Fast # [2] Even though it’s built on gatsbyjs the full site builds in under 2s even on slower hardware. This is because the site is already pre-rendered and stripped of any excess. It’s zipped up right into the python package and is typically used with the cli, but now can be used with python, or as a hook as well. What is kedro-viz [3] 🤔 # [4] Kedro viz is a fantastic kedro plugin that allows you to visualize your data pipeline. Kedro allows you to quickly build produc...

Create Configurable Kedro Hooks

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. What is Kedro [1] If you are completely unsure what kedro is be sure to check out my what is kedro [2] post Installation # [3] .create a new environment manager of choice. Here I will use conda. Then we will install kedro from pypi. conda create -n kedro_class_hooks -y conda activate kedro_class_hooks # may also be source activate kedro_class_hooks or activate kedro_class_hooks pip install kedro Create a sample project # [4] Kedro new # [5] For more details check out my full post on kedro new [6] For this post I really just want a working pipeline as fast as possible. For this I am going to use iris pipeline that is generated from the kedro new command in the cli. It’s important that you answer y to create an example pi...
3 min read ↺ 1

Brainstorming Kedro Hooks

This post is a 🧠 branstorming work in progress. I will likely use it as a storage location/brain dump of hook ideas. What is Kedro 🤔 # [1] If you are completely unsure what kedro is be sure to check out my what is kedro [2] post after_catalog_created # [3] - filepath replacer - bucket replacer before_pipeline_run # [4] - preflight - check that data exists - run kedro_static_viz - run mypy - run interrogate - run flake8 after_pipeline_run # [5] - Great Expectations - send email - send slack before_node_run # [6] after_node_run # [7] - Great Expectations - save stats/meta data - Execution Order # [8] hooks are executed in reverse order of the hooks list. hooks with tryfirst will be moved to the end of the list hooks with trylast will be moved to the end of the list - after_catalog_created - before_pipeline_run - args - run_params = run_params = {‘run_id’: ‘2020-05-23T15.24.23.958Z’, ‘project_path’: ‘/mnt/c/temp/kedro0160’, ’env’: ’local’, ‘kedro_version’: ‘...

How to get Dev Comments from an article Url

I want to incorporate some of the wonderful comments, \U0001F495, \U0001F984, and \U0001F516’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. 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. The API # [1] dev.to has an open API that allows us to easily get comments as HTML [2]. They have their API hosted at https://docs.forem.com/api/#tag/comments, let’s take a look at it. [3] Here we can...

Four github actions for your website

GitHub’s actions are a new GitHub feature that will trigger GitHub to spin up a virtual machine and run some tasks with some special access to your repo. It can interact with comments/issues, it can clone your repo, You can explicitly pass in secrets so that it can commit back to the repo or deploy to another service. The environment may be a Linux, windows, or even a mac machine. I believe this is wildly incredible for the open-source community, putting these tools in the same place that we are already collaborating is so convenient. What can they do for my personal website? 🤔 # [1] GitHub actions can give you confidence that your site is up and running, with the latest 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. - periodically check that the website is up - update npm - url checker - screenshot website srt32/uptime [2] # [3] srt32/uptime [2] is an action that...

Create Custom Kedro Dataset

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. But what is happening behind the scenes # [1] Under the hood there is an AbstractDataSet that each connector inherits from. It sets up a lot of the behind the scenes structure for us so that we dont have to. For the most part kedro has connectors for about anything that you want to load, csv, parquet, sql, json, from about anywhere, http, s3, localfile system are just some of the examples. Here is a DataSet implementation from their docs. Here you can see the barebones example straight from the docs. Parameters from the yaml catalog will get passed in from pathlib import Path import pandas as pd from kedro.io import AbstractDataSet class MyOwnDataSet(...

Interrogate is a pretty awesome, brand new, cli for Python packages

As usual while listening to python bytes 181 [1] I heard of a tool that I had to try out right away! This thing is 🔥 hot off the press folks, we’re talking the first release only 3 weeks ago. Its something that the python community needed years ago, and it belongs in your CI today. I had tried several tools that tried to do docstring coverage in the past but they were a bit cumbersome and were quickly forgotten about. Not interrogate, its dead simple! Nothing I have tried has come close to being this good Interrogate # [2] It runs documentation coverage for your python project. It allows you to set the minimum amount of docstring coverage for your project and has some great setup instructions right in the readme. Install it # [3] Interrogate is on pypi so it is super simple to install with pip pip install interrogate run it # [4] This is the best part, its super easy to run right from the command line! Just call it, and give it a path to run. interrogate -v <path> 😲 I hav...
2 min read

drawing ascii boxes

When creating cli’s I often want some nice full-width character. I find it tough to find them, and when I do half the time it is an image or something that cannot be copied 👿. I rarely get very complex with my semi-manual ASCII art. I can do 98% of what I need with bars and corners. Using some simple full-width characters can really give your cli a nice clean look. Example # [1] I’d say 50% of what I need is just a full-width horizontal bar to give some visual flair or separation. [2] Bars # [3] ― ⍽ ⎸ ⎹ ␣ ─ ━ │ ┃ Square Corners # [4] ┌ ┍ ┎ ┏ ┐ ┑ ┒ ┓ └ ┕ ┖ ┗ ┘ ┙ ┚ ┛ Round Corners # [5] ╭ ╮ ╯ ╰ ╱ ╲ ╳ Harpoons # [6] ⃑ ⃬ ⃭ ↼ ↽ ↾ ↿ ⇀ ⇁ ⇂ ⇃ ⇋ ⇌ ⥊ ⥋ ⥌ ⥍ ⥎ ⥏ ⥐ ⥑ ⥒ ⥓ ⥔ ⥕ ⥖ ⥗ ⥘ ⥙ ⥚ ⥛ ⥜ ⥝ ⥞ ⥟ ⥠ ⥡ ⥢ ⥣ ⥤ ⥥ ⥦ ⥧ ⥨ ⥩ ⥪ ⥫ ⥬ ⥭ ⥮ ⥯ Double Boxes # [7] ═ ║ ╒ ╓ ╔ ╕ ╖ ╗ ╘ ╙ ╚ ╛ ╜ ╝ ╞ ╟ ╠ ╡ ╢ ╣ ╤ ╥ ╦ ╧ ╨ ╩ ╪ ╫ ╬ Dashed Boxes # [8] ┄ ┅ ┆ ┇ ┈ ┉ ┊ ┋╌ ╍ ╎ ╏ Connectors # [9] ├ ┝ ┞ ┟ ┠ ┡ ┢ ┣ ┤ ┥ ┦ ┧ ┨ ┩ ┪ ┫ ┬ ┭ ┮ ┯ ┰ ┱ ┲ ┳ ┴ ┵ ┶ ┷ ┸ ┹ ┺ ┻ ┼ ┽ ┾ ┿ ╀ ╁ ╂ ╃ ╄ ╅ ╆ ╇ ╈ ╉ ╊ ╋ Others # [10] ☐ ☑ ☒ ⫍ ⫎ ⮹ ⮽...
1 min read

creating the kedro-preflight hook

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 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. What is Kedro [1] If you are completely unsure what kedro is be sure to check out my what is kedro post Docs # [2] a w...

📢 Announcing find-kedro

find-kedro is a small library to enhance your kedro experience. It looks through your modules to find kedro pipelines, nodes, and iterables (lists, sets, tuples) of nodes. It then assembles them into a dictionary of pipelines, each module will create a separate pipeline, and __default__ being a combination of all pipelines. This format is compatible with the kedro _create_pipelines format. [1] [2] [3] [4] # [5] kedro is a ✨ fantastic project that allows for super-fast prototyping of data pipelines, while yielding production-ready pipelines. find-kedro enhances this experience by adding a pytest like node/pipeline discovery eliminating the need to bubble up pipelines through modules. When working on larger pipeline projects, it is advisable to break your project down into different sub-modules which requires knowledge of building python libraries, and knowing how to import each module correctly. While this is not too difficult, in some cases, it can trip up even the most se...

Explicit vs Implicit Returns in Javascript

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. [1] # [2] Arrow functions are one-liner functions in javascript that have two main syntactical ways to create the code block. with parentheses and braces. Let’s take a look at both ways of creating arrow functions so that when we come accross them in the wild it will all make sense. [3] # [4] Here is an example of an arrow function that will implicitly return the last statement without the return keyword. I believe that these are a bit more restricted in that you cannot set variables inside them. They are ...

TIL: Bind arguments to dynamically generated lambdas in python

This past week I had a really weird bug in my kedro [1] 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. NOTE While this story is about a kedro pipeline, it can be applied anywhere closures are put into an iterable. [2] # [3] After a few days of looking at it off and on, I pinpointed that it was all the way down in the raw layer. Right as data is coming off of the database. For this I already had existing sql files stored and a read_sql function to get the data so I opted to just set up the pipeline to utilize the existing code as much as possible, leaning on the kedro [1] framework a bit less. I have dynamically created lists of pipeline nodes many times in the past, but typically I take data from kedro [1] input and use it in the lambda. I prefer the simplicity of using lambdas over functools.partial. It typically looks something like this. #...
2 min read

Four Github Actions for Python

If you are developing python packages and using GitHub here are four actions that you can use today to automate your release workflow. Since python tools generally have such a simple cli I have opted to use the cli for most of these, that way I know exactly what is happening and have more control over it if I need. h2 img { width: 100%; box-shadow: .5rem .5rem 3rem #141F2D, -.5rem -.5rem 3rem rgba(255,255,255,.1);} img{ max-width: 100% !important;} If you are developing python packages and using GitHub here are four actions that you can use today to automate your release workflow. Since python tools generally have such a simple cli I have opted to use the cli for most of these, that way I know exactly what is happening and have more control over it if I need. - Lint - Test - Package - Upload to PyPi Lint With flake8 # [1] flake8 is pythons quintessential linting tool to ensure that your code is up to the standards that you have set for the project, and to help prevent hidden...

Variables names don't need their type

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. Examples # [1] Pandas DataFrames are probably the worst offender that I see # bad sales_df = get_sales() # good sales = get_sales() Sometimes vanilla structures too! # bad items_list = ['sneakers', 'pencils', 'paper', ] # good items = ['sneakers', 'pencils', 'paper', ] Edge Cases? # [2] It’s so common when you need to get inside a data structure in a special way that itsn’t provided by the library…. I am not exactly sure of a good way around it. # bad ?? sales = get_sales() sales_dict = sales.to_dict() # good 🤷‍♀️ Containers are plural # [3] Always name your containers plural, so that naming while iterating is simple. prices = {} items = ['sneakers', 'pencils', 'paper', ] for item in items: prices[item] = get_price(item) Before I start fights 🥊 in code review, am I inline here or just being pedantic? References: [1]: #examples [2]: #edge-cases...