Blog
Words words words. Old posts to be migrated “shortly.”
👀 googly 👀
A year and a half between blog entries? That’s pretty standard, although I suppose I did move to Canada in that time. The Zen of Python refers to a list of principles for Python-y code. Some of these were on my mind when I was trying to figure out some Google APIs. Simple is better than complex. Flat is better than nested. Readability counts. Here’s Google’s provided code from their quickstart for retrieving values from a spreadsheet.
The Glitz! The Glamour! The Oscars!
Once again, I must grapple with my addiction to organizing data and making pipelines to organize data. This time, my sights are set on The Oscars. Now generally, I am anti-award show. They never give awards to who I think should get them or to the three things that I’ve seen in whatever year. Very occasionally I’ll have a hot take (like how they definitely should give John Williams another Oscar this year) but honestly, it’s been years since I’ve watched a ceremony.
We need more votes
I have a problem. As I’ve mentioned before, I derive an odd pleasure from organizing data and making pipelines that organize data. It’s a sickness, to the point where sometimes someone can point me at a dataset that is either noisy or needlessly inaccessible, and writing a pile of Python to organize it becomes the thing I do to relax, scratching that part of my brain that wants to see efficiency everywhere.
Data data everywhere
I learned basic SQL my sophomore year of college (late 2003 if you’re keeping score). I didn’t learn Python until the summer of 2006 during an internship at IBM Watson Research Labs. As someone who obsessively collects data, my standard approach had been to collect the data and then dump it to a yaml file. Once the data I collected was big enough, I realized I needed to be smarter about storage, and ever since then, I’ve been frustrated by the integration of SQL and Python.
f1rstp0st!!
New year, new website. I decided the I wanted 2023 to be The Year In Which I Finished Side Projects. While I could arguably claim that this has been my resolution every year dating back to 2009, I’m going to try to stick with it. As with every new year’s resolution that starts with a blog post, I’m sure that this will seem naive in the future when this is the only blog post on the entire site.