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May 2026 | 58 posts
Looking for inspiration? joelhooks-com [1] by joelhooks [2]. playing with static pages References: [1]: https://github.com/joelhooks/joelhooks-com [2]: https://github.com/joelhooks

Automating my Post Starter

One thing we all dread is mundane work of getting started, and all the hoops it takes to get going. This year I want to post more often and I am taking some steps towards making it easier for myself to just get started. When I start a new post I need to cd into my blog directory, start neovim in a markdown file with a clever name, copy some frontmatter boilerplate, update the post date, add tags, a description, and a cover. Todo List for starting a post # [1] - frontmatter template - Title - slug - tags - date - cover - description - create markdown file - open in neovim Lets Automate this # [2] This aint no proper cli # [3] hot and fast As with many thing running behind the scenes on this site, I am the one and only user, I have limited time, so this is going to be a bit hot and fast. Let’s create a file called new-post. start the script new-post #!python # new-post 👆 Works on my machine If this were something that had more users than me I would probably use some...

Windowing Python Lists

In python data science we often will reach for pandas a bit more than necessary. While pandas can save us so much there are times where there are alternatives that are much simpler. The itertoolsandmore-itertools` are full of cases of this. This post is a walkthrough of me solving a problem with more-itertools rather than reaching for a for loop, or pandas. I am working on a one-line-link expander for my blog. I ended up doing it, just by modifying the markdown with python. I first split the post into lines with content.split('\n'), then look to see if the line appears to be just a link. One more safety net that I wanted to add was to check if there was whitespace around the line, this could not simply be done in a list comprehension by itself. I need just a bit of knowledge of the surrounding lines, enter more-itertools. simplified rendering function # [1] I have a function that will check to see if the line should be expanded, then render the correct template. Fist step is to ...
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WaylonWalker [1] has done a fantastic job with devtainer [2]. Highly recommend taking a look. 🐳 (dotfiles) My personal development docker container base image References: [1]: https://github.com/WaylonWalker [2]: https://github.com/WaylonWalker/devtainer
WaylonWalker [1] has done a fantastic job with WaylonWalker [2]. Highly recommend taking a look. Learning in public References: [1]: https://github.com/WaylonWalker [2]: https://github.com/WaylonWalker/WaylonWalker
Check out aoc [1] by ThePrimeagen [2]. It’s a well-crafted project with great potential. 2020 References: [1]: https://github.com/ThePrimeagen/aoc [2]: https://github.com/ThePrimeagen
Check out ZaxR [1] and their project bulwark [2]. Bulwark is a package for convenient property-based testing of pandas dataframes. References: [1]: https://github.com/ZaxR [2]: https://github.com/ZaxR/bulwark
mariokostelac [1] has done a fantastic job with sagemaker-setup [2]. Highly recommend taking a look. Useful scripts for making AWS SageMaker better References: [1]: https://github.com/mariokostelac [2]: https://github.com/mariokostelac/sagemaker-setup
I like pypeaday’s [1] project aoc-2020 [2]. Advent of Code 2020 References: [1]: https://github.com/pypeaday [2]: https://github.com/pypeaday/aoc-2020
I’m really excited about auto-editor [1], an amazing project by WyattBlue [2]. It’s worth exploring! Auto-Editor: Efficient media analysis and rendering References: [1]: https://github.com/WyattBlue/auto-editor [2]: https://github.com/WyattBlue

Adding Audio to my blog posts

This is episode 1 of the Waylon Walker Audio experience, posts from waylonwalker.com [1]{.hoverlink} in audio form. So I have had this idea for awhile to add audio to my blog posts. The idea partly comes from the aws blog, if you have ever been on their blog you will have noticed that they have a voiced by amazon polly section. What to Expect # [2] Honestly I don’t know this is all new to me and I dont have much to go off of. For now its a test that may or may not work out. I will say that the time that I have available for clean audio is a bit limited so expect these to come out in batches as I get time to go back and record. What Not to Expect # [3] One thing that makes the aws blog really hard to listen to is the robotic voice, I definitely don’t want that. This will be voiced by a real human, Me. At the same time written text doesn’t translate directly to audio well so don’t necessarily expect the audio to be word for word. Code blocks # [4] There are a lot of code block...
Check out yetudada [1] and their project yetudada [2]. No description available. References: [1]: https://github.com/yetudada [2]: https://github.com/yetudada/yetudada
I’m impressed by quickpython [1] from timothycrosley [2]. A retro interactive coding environment powered by Python and nostalgia References: [1]: https://github.com/timothycrosley/quickpython [2]: https://github.com/timothycrosley

gatsby-remark-embedder

Inspired by discourse’s link expansion I am rolling out expansions for one line links on the blog waylonwalker [1]. I was able to find a gatsby plugin gatsby-remark-embedder [2] that expands one line links for social cards for popular platforms like twitter and YouTube through a repose from Kyle Mathews to my tweet. https://twitter.com/kylemathews/status/1329817928666005504 Use Cases # [3] This covers a couple of use cases I have with very little effort. - Twitter - YouTube install # [4] npm i gatsby-remark-embedder gatsby-plugin-twitter This was super quick and simple to setup, the only thing that was extra was to install the gatsby-plugin-twitter plugin as well as the gatsby-remark-embedder. enable # [5] // In your gatsby-config.js module.exports = { // Find the 'plugins' array plugins: [ `gatsby-plugin-twitter`, { resolve: `gatsby-transformer-remark`, options: { plugins: [ { resolve: `gatsby-remark-embedder`, options: { customTransformers: [ // Your custom t...

Expand One Line Links

I wanted a super simple way to cross-link blog posts that require as little effort as possible, yet still looks good in vanilla markdown in GitHub. I have been using a snippet that puts HTML [1] into the markdown. While this works, it’s more manual/difficult for me does not look the best, and does not read well as Goals for new card # [2] The new card should be fully automated to expand with title, description, and cover image. Bonus if I am able to attach a comment behind it. - fully automated - card expansion - Title - description - cover image Old Card # [3] If you can call it a card 🤣. This card was just an image wrapped in an anchor tag and a paragraph tag. I found this was the most consistent way to get an image narrower and centered in both GitHub and dev.to. <p style='text-align: center'> <a href='https://waylonwalker.com/notes/eight-years-cat/'> <img style='width:500px; max-width:80%; margin: auto;' src="https://dropper.wayl.one/file/99f80283-2f27-4664-8c4a-d1...
astronomer [1] has done a fantastic job with dag-factory [2]. Highly recommend taking a look. Dynamically generate Apache Airflow DAGs from YAML configuration files References: [1]: https://github.com/astronomer [2]: https://github.com/astronomer/dag-factory
orchest [1] by orchest [2] is a game-changer in its space. Excited to see how it evolves. Build data pipelines, the easy way 🛠️ References: [1]: https://github.com/orchest/orchest [2]: https://github.com/orchest

Find and Replace in the Terminal.

grepr # [1] grepr() {grep -iRl "$1" | xargs sed -i "s/$1/$2/g"} ```bash grepr() {grep -iRl "$1" | xargs sed -i "s/$1/$2/g"} grepd # [2] grepd() {grep -iRl "$1" | xargs sed -i "/^$1/d"} CocSearch # [3] :CocSearch published: false -g *.md References: [1]: #grepr [2]: #grepd [3]: #cocsearch
gvanrossum [1] has done a fantastic job with patma [2]. Highly recommend taking a look. Pattern Matching References: [1]: https://github.com/gvanrossum [2]: https://github.com/gvanrossum/patma

Resume Tips

- customize for the job - Why are you a good fit? - What will you bring to the role? - Give real outcomes - give real experience - Stop tech vomiting - if you link to GitHub - Make a profile readme - Guide me to your best work - have some activity - if you link to LinkedIn - Provide some benefit that is not on your resume - Have a logical flow of experience (dont make me hunt for past experience) - Keep it under 2 pages - Who you know. - Reference real experience - Deployed 12 data pipelines with over 500 nodes to process 200GB of data at a Fortune 100 company - vs - Knowledge of Data Engineering methodology with python EC2 - Dont be so fluffy
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