As a kid, I was fortunate enough to have role models in Senseis Judy and Reese Rigby. At their dojo, I learned the importance of practicing the “basics” - beginner katas, simple controlled motions, proper stance, breathing, calisthenics.

I find it interesting to think about software testing in terms of epistemology. We might think of a test suite as a set of knowledge claims about the behavior of our software. At the level of end-to-end tests, such knowledge claims may often correspond to user stories.

One of the reasons objects are powerful - in the OOP sense - is because we can write and reason about them as anthropomorphic collaborators.* I realize that such a characterization of objects is not to everyone's liking, but I'd like to use this notion to set the context for the following observations about how private methods are a sign of incomplete design.

Much has been written about Python's GIL (global interpreter lock), which constrains a Python process to a single processor at a time. At a high level, it's important to remember that if your Python program is I/O bound, use threading, and if it's CPU-bound, use multiprocessing.

A few weeks ago, I set up a Stripe integration for a job board for entry-level engineers I launched. The project is cloud-native, comprising a combination of API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB on the back end.

Quick reference for basic CF template syntax, the use of parameters, mappings, resources, and outputs

This is a bookmark-able reference to commonly used commands in Unix-like environments.

Sometimes the trickiest part of an ETL problem is transforming the raw data you have into a useful format.