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There are many useful chrome extensions out there. I probably have way too many installed, here are four that I am currently using. This post was inspired from Chris over at daily-dev-tips [1] - LastPass [2] - Stylus [3] - Vimium [4] - hypothesis [5] --- LastPass [6] # [7] Love it or hate it passwords are hard to manage. Everyone needs a password manager to avoid the dreaded password reuse, and to be able to quickly rotate them with a service. I use lastpass, thus it’s browser extension is my most used extension. [6] --- Stylus [8] # [9] Stylus is an extension that allows you to add your own CSS to style pages how you want. There seems to be a full community of folks that really use this to the nth degree to style all of their commonly used sites somewhat similarly or add dark mode to sites without it. Personally I mostly use it to add my favorite syntax highlighting theme to jupyter, onedark. I’ve long lost the original author, but have posted the CSS I use in this gi...

Bash is a language that is quite useful for automation no matter what language you write in. Bash can do so many powerful system-level tasks. Even if you are on windows these days you are likely to come across bash inside a cloud VM, Continuous Integration, or even inside of docker. I have three techniques that help me write more composable bash scripts. - functions [1] - Arguments [2] - positional arguments [3] - All Arguments [4] - Error Handling [5] - main script [6] --- Functions # [1] Break scripts down into reusable components Functions in bash are quite simple. They are something that I wish I would have started using long ago. They make your code much more reusable. I often use them in my aliases as well since they can simplify the process and allow more flexibility. syntax #!/bin/sh # hello_world hello_world () { echo "hello world" } Source the file to load the function and run it from the terminal. run it source hello_world hello_world outputs hello world ...

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. So many of us dabble in or become power users of spreadsheets without knowing there is an alternative out there that can save us time, automate boring things, and allow us to open up our minds for the part that we add value, Thinking about the data. Focus on Value Add Operations # [1] Lets face it, stitching together spreadsheets is zero value add by itself, but if you can see something in the data and take action on it, this can be huge value add to your company. Learning just a bit of python will help focus more of your attention on “value add operations” and leave the mundane stuff to your computer. Merge a directory full of spreadsheets into one # [2] I see this one all the time. One team gets a spreadsheet from another team once per month and they need to stich all the pieces together. Excel really opens the door for some na...

miniconda is a python distribution from continuum. It’s a slimmed-down version of their very popular anaconda distribution. It comes with its own environment manager and has eased the install process for many that do not have a way to compile c-extensions. It made it much easier to install the data science stack on windows a few years ago. These days windows are much better than it was back then at compiling c-extensions. I still like its environment manager, which installs to a global directory rather than a local directory for your project. Installing miniconda on Linux # [1] Installing miniconda on Linux can be a bit tricky the first time you do it completely from the terminal. The following snippet will create a directory to install miniconda into, download the latest python 3 based install script for Linux 64 bit, run the install script, delete the install script, then add a conda initialize to your bash or zsh shell. After doing this you can restart your shell and conda will...

This post was inspired by a comment I left on @dsteenman’s post. {% post dsteenman/how-long-should-a-blogpost-be-2k6n %} Most of the time I prefer short as I am more likely to read the whole thing. If its setup as a series I am more likely to work my way through the whole series in a matter of a few sessions. Just my preference I will say though there are certain articles that fit well to the long format. They are articles that folks tend to come back to often as a reference again and again. Sections # [1] - layout is key [2] - Break it up [3] - Article types [4] - superpost [5] - single post [6] - series [7] - discussion [8] - Post what you want to read [9] layout is key # [2] Either way, you go layout is key. You are not Steven King, no matter how great of a writer you are, you are unlikely to hold attention like he can. Most folks reading blogs scan articles first. I often scan, then read. If the article is really good or pertains well to me I will read everything, ...

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. Based on an episode of react podcast. 🎙 Listen to the full episode [1]. So Inspirational # [2] I was particularly inspired by @chantastic [3] episode 103 of the react podcast with @ParissAthena [4]. 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 ...

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. Check out the repo for git-auto-commit-action [1]. 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. This has been by far the easiest way to commit back to a repo that I have seen. Other patterns often require fully setting up the git [2] user and everything. While it’s not all that hard, this action already has all of that covered. You must give it a commit message and thats it. Optionally you can configure a number of things. Its possible to configure the commit_user_name, commit_user_email, and commit_author. I often also scope the file_pattern to a certain subset of files. --- [3] If you’re new to actions check out this article on using actions. [3] If you’re new to actions check out this article on using a...

If we take a look at the release notes [1] I see one major feature improvement on the list, auto-discovery of hooks. ## Major features and improvements * Enabled auto-discovery of hooks implementations coming from installed plugins. This one comes a bit surprising as it was just casually mentioned in #435 [2] [2] Think pytest # [3] As mentioned in #435 [2] this is the model that pytest uses. Not all plugins automatically start doing things right out of the box but require a CLI argument. simplicity # [4] It feels a bit crazy that simply installing a package will change the way that your pipeline gets executed. I do like that it requires just a bit less reaching into the framework stuff for the average user. Most folks will be able to write in the catalog and nodes without much change to the rest of the project. Implementation # [5] Reading through the docs [6], they show us that we can make our hooks automatically register by adding a kedro.hooks endpoint that points to a ...