February 26, 2022

Grist, Onboarding Engineers, a Career-Ending Mistake

• This is not a meeting.

  Do you want to know why you’re fatigued at the end of a long day of video conferences? It’s because your brain has been straining to collect essential information that is no longer there.

• Is a MS in Stats the best degree for a career in data science? Linear algebra training has been a huge benefit, but my lack of stats knowledge has presented its challenges. As one commenter said, “The grass is always greener on the other side.”

• I love pandas and dataframes, and yet I struggle with indexing. This article on indexing dataframes in pandas provides the best explanation I’ve seen on indexing dataframes, and I learned some new things, like the difference between df['name'] and df.name. It’s long but worth noting for future reference.

• Organizing an engineering team around a QRF (Quick-Reaction Force) to take on tasks that normally interrupt sprint work sounds like a terrible idea. Nevertheless, I found it to be a good good thought experiment to think about how this would (or would not) work in our organization.

• csv.vim is a Vim plugin used for handling column separated data.

• Atlas is a CLI-based database tool for working with MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and SQLite.

• Grist is an open-source alternative to Airtable (and Google Sheets), aka “a modern relational spreadsheet” for organizing data.

• A terrific interview with Sebastian Ramirez, the creator of FastAPI.

• 8 simple steps for onboarding engineers from Luca Rossi’s Refactoring newsletter.

• An excellent read on a career ending mistake.

  The indispensable first step to getting what you want is this: decide what you want. (Ben Stein)

• The next PyData Triangle meetup is Wednesday, March 2, 2022. The talk on unit testing for ML model deployments sounds interesting.