AWS Python Lambda: Not Quite So Simple?
Python + AWS Lambda…simple, quick, effective code delivered at the click of an upload button? Not always. Python lets you write complex solutions quickly using English-like syntax and AWS Lambda lets you edit in a ...
Building a Better Mousetrap
Recently, my daughter (age 6) was into building “mousetraps” out of shoe boxes. These were more or less comfortable cardboard mouse houses complete with beds, rooms, everything a mouse could want or need and not ...
Large Data Migrations Django
Been working with a Django project with a large dataset and wanted to insert a bunch of inter-related data in a migration. Where Django has support for data migrations via the migration framework, it doesn’t ...
Local Testing for GCP Cloud Functions
It’s easy to write Google Cloud Functions in Python. The trick is to put a function that takes a single object in a file called main.py. Their example is simply: def hello_world(request): """Responds to any ...
Up and Running with AWS Glue
AWS Glue is a managed service that can really help simplify ETL work. In this blog I’m going to cover creating a crawler, creating an ETL job, and setting up a development endpoint. Since Glue ...
Managing Python environments with direnv
A few months ago I discovered direnv and was surprised how I got along so well with out it. From the website, direnv ” allows project-specific environment variables without cluttering the ~/.profile file.” I used ...
Creating dynamic headers in Reportlab
When writing code to make a report, you never truly know what you are going to get into. In a recent Python project, I was using the excellent ReportLab libraryand things were going smoothly. But then ...
Creating Raw SQL Migrations in Django
I am using Django, which has great support for PostgreSQL-specific functions in it’s ORM. I wanted to use a SearchVectorField inside my application and PostgreSQL recommends creating a trigger for to populate that column. Well that was easy enough but I ...
Managing Multiple Python Instances
The problem with working on different Python codebases is the versioning and the large amounts of libraries available. Say you are working on a data science project using Pandas and then suddenly your boss wants ...
Converting Maven Dependencies to Gradle
I had the, er, honor of converting an old ANT build to Gradle. It was one of those with the directories filled with jars and was having a hard time figuring out what dependency was ...