Brain-Damaged Data

We process a fair amount of externally-prepared datasets. 40,000 rows of econometric data that we purchased from a third-party. Mostly, the data is in a usable format: .CSV or .XSLX.

Once in a while, we get CSV with |. A few times, we got fixed-format COBOL-style records.

Recently, we got …

more ...



Simplicity vs. Depth

Date Tags #python

During chapter technical reviews, the question of technical depth has come up time and again. Essentially, in every single chapter. In the older Building Skills in Python book, there are a number of topics that feel "digressive" to the reviewer and editor. Too much depth.

However, there are a number …

more ...


Meetup Tonight

Tonight (May 25th). Red Dog. Colley Ave. Ghent. I'll be wearing my Stack Overflow shirt. I'll be there about 7. I know that at least one other person won't be there until 8.

The Meetup link.

I like this meetup idea a lot. Probably because the WFH life-style is a …

more ...


Decisions and Consequences

A single poorly-made decision can have profound ripple-effects. Once your stuck with it, you make accommodations, hacks and work-arounds. Eventually, things work, but the result is less than ideal.

Changing tack requires sometimes pervasive rework to the application. How can we reduce the risks and improve the value created?

A …

more ...

The curse of procedural design

After reverse engineering procedural code in C, VB or even Python, I'm finding that procedural programming inevitably leads to bad, bad code-rot.

Consider some of the common design patterns.

Strategy. Confronted with alternative strategy choices, a purely procedural code solution is either

  • If-statements everywhere the strategy is involved.
  • Block comments …
more ...