Three weeks ago, I made an appointment to get a demo of a product I already knew I wanted to buy, because I had used it at another employer. No matter, the site would not let me sign us up until I got a demo and spoke to a sales drone. Last week, before that…
What AI Portends
It’s funny how humans have the same conversations over and over again across generations. When I was a kid in the 70s, the old folks talked about kids watching too much TV and it turning their brains to mush. In the 90’s parents talked about kids being obsessed with Gameboys and consoles and it turning…
Auditing Your Data Migration To ClickHouse Using ClickHouse Local
I’ve been developing a quick and dirty data migration routine to get terabytes of data stored in AWS S3 as parquet files into our ClickHouse Cloud cluster. I’m really happy that I took some time to read up on the clickhouse local command, which is included in any installation of ClickHouse. Not only was this…
ClickHouse Cheat Sheet 2024
For the past 4 months, ClickHouse has been my life, full time. I’ve been vetting it for production use and learning all about it in the process. Since my memory has always been notoriously poor, I take a lot of notes (in fact, that was the original reason for this blog’s existence). So, while I’d…
User Activation With Django and Djoser
Depending on the project, Django and Djoser can go really well together. Django provides such an enormous feature set as a foundation, and such a modular platform, that tools like Djoser can provide enormous value while still staying out of the way of the rest of your application. At the same time, the whole solution…
Python Selenium Webdriver Notes
I used Python Selenium Webdriver for a project wherein a client needs a program that will log into around 25 different web sites, and download a total of 750-1000 different documents. Automating operations across so many different sites has been a huge learning opportunity for me. It’s a lot of fun! I had a passing familiarity…
On Keeping A Journal and Journaling
I've kept a journal since I was 11. That was in the mid 80's. I hadn't heard the word “journaling” until about a year or so ago, and lately it appears that giving advice and howto information about journaling is a bit of a cottage industry. I had no idea so many people were in…
What Geeks Could Learn From Working In Restaurants
I spent a long time in my teens and early 20’s working in restaurants. To be honest, I loved just about every minute of it. It’s exciting, you’re never idle, and it’s usually not boring: you either get immediate gratification from happy customers leaving a nice tip, or you’re on the defensive, thinking on your…
What I’ve Been Up To
Historically, I post fairly regularly on this blog, but I haven’t been lately. It’s not for lack of anything to write about, but rather a lack of time to devote to blogging. I want to post at greater length about some of the stuff I’ve been doing, and I have several draft posts, but I…
PyCon Talk Proposals: All You Need to Know And More
Writing a talk proposal needn’t be a stressful undertaking. There are two huge factors that seem to stress people out the most about submitting a proposal, and we’re going to obliterate those right now, so here they are: It’s not always obvious how a particular section of a proposal is evaluated, so it’s not always…