Open Source Support Ideas

"... [I] am thinking of building an in house conda forge, or buying a solution, or paying someone to set something up."

The build v. Buy decision. This is always hard. Really hard.

We used to ask "What's your business? Is it building software or making widgets?"

And (for some) the …

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COBOL File Processing in Python (really)

Years ago (6? 7?) I did some data profiling in Python.

This required reading COBOL files with Python code.

Superficially, this is not really very hard.

  1. Python slice syntax will pick fields on of the record. For example: data[12:14].

#. Python codecs will convert from EBCDIC to Unicode without …

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Literate Programming

About a decade ago, I discovered the concept of Literate Programming. It's seductive. The idea is to write elegant documentation that embeds the actual working code.

For tricky, complex, high-visibility components, a literate programming approach can give people confidence that the software actually works as advertised.

I actually wrote my …

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