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Here is one useful thing that you can do with GitHub actions no matter what language you use, send email. You might want to know right away when your ci passes. You might want to give your team a nice pat on the back when a new release is deployed. There might be subscribers wanting to see the latest release notes in their inbox as soon as the latest version is deployed. Whatever it is, its pretty easy to do with an action right out of the actions marketplace.

Here is a silly example that sends an email to yourself anytime someone stars your repo.

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.

I have been diving deep into Github actions for about a month now and they are wicked good! They allow you to run any sort of arbitrary code based on events in your repo, webhooks, or schedules. They are very reasonably priced. The interface that GitHub hs developed for them is top-notch! It’s so good I have done 90% of my editing of them right from github.com.

some interaction to your repository triggers code to run.

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Github actions are written in configuration files using the YAML syntax. YAML is a superset of JSON. Most YAML can be expressed inline with JSON syntax. Similar to python YAML is whitespace driven by whitespace rather than brackets tags. The argument for using YAML for configuration files such as actions is that it is more human-readable and editable. It’s much easier to see the whitespace layout than it is to get closing brackets correct. For actions, I believe this is mostly true. I don’t see any use case to get past 3-5 indents, which is completely manageable.

Can I just say that I learned more than I realized about YAML by writing this article

In YAML or JSON, the most basic containers for data are arrays, a 1D list of things, and objects, for key-value pairs.

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Today I learned how to diff between two branches.

git diff feature..main

Sometimes we get a little git add . && git commit -m "WIP" happy and mistakenly commit something that we just can’t figure out. This is a good way to figure out what the heck has changed on the current branch compared to any other branch.

Let’s create a new directory, initialize git and toss some content into a readme.

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This is a quickstart to getting a new kedro pipeline up and running. After this article you should be able to understand how to get started with kedro. You can learn more about this Hello World Example in the docs

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You dont have to start out as a git wizard with the cleanest possible commit history. At first dont let yourself get too wrapped up in it, the most important part is that you make commits. You will find needs for more advanced stuff later.

git add . git commit -m "FEAT added new function to calculate revenue by product family" git push

Get comfortable with this, then learn how to branch, rebase, stash, etc…

Get the job done. Keep it in small bite size pieces. Make readable function definitions and variable names. You will thank yourself for naming things well later. Readability counts more than performance in most cases of data science. If it gets the job done try not to over worry about things like performance. A few extra seconds to clean a dataset or build a model is not worth hours of your time. As you go you will have cases that performance is more critical and you will learn what to do from the start to avoid...

I am working through Wes Bos’s beginnerjavascript.com/ I just hit module 18 on hoisting. It’s something that I always knew was there, Its not something I typically see used or use myself.

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.

There are many articles that cover this in far more depth, but its the idea that variable declarations and functions are defined before they are executed. This means that it doesnt matter if you call a function before or after it is defined.

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What is Kedro

This is my original what-is-kedro article. There is a brand new one

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.

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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.

Inspired by Wes Bos’s new uses.tech I wanted a custom scrollbar on my personal site. I had tried to do it in the past, but gave up after it was not working.

Since uses.tech is open source I jumped on github, searched for scroll and found this February 21, 2020 2 min read