Agile Safe Meetup - Jira Portfolio

This week I attended a new meetup for me - Agile SAFE. I attended because they were reviewing a specific plugin for Jira that I had only heard about. Turns out it solves a lot of the problems that I have spent a lot of time in Python attempting to resolve.

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Review - iPyleaflet Jupyter Widget

Recently I had a project were I needed to plot locations on a map, the data was already in geopandas and I needed to add basemaps to the background of the plots to add context.

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Recap of Pycon 2018

I arrived at Pycon 2018 in Cleveland on Thursday evening, just in time for the reception hall to open. I spent the next couple of hours going to the vendor booths, barely missing getting a signed Dave Beasley Python Cookbook, but he was gracious enough to have a photo taken with me.

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Trying Out i3 Window Manager

The title says it all. I have been trying out i3 windows manager on both Windows 10 and on Linux. Overall I like it, and I am using it right now to write this blog post.

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Betraying Open Source - Altova Missionkit

I am not the only one googling and posting on stack StackOverflow looking for an Open Source alternative to Altova Mapforce. Responses are few, vague and honestly not worth following up on. I felt somehow defeated that a proprietary tool rules this space so perfectly suited for Open Source. Then I started using it. It is so much just a tool that works, I can see why no one has bothered starting an OSS alternative.

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Jupyter Notebooks on Azure

Today I read an article in MSDN magazine about Jupyter Notebooks on Azure. This could be an excellent solution to use Jupyter for companies where Active Directory, Office365, and Azure are tightly integrated, and there is an aversion to installing Anaconda.

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Grammarly to the Rescue

A while ago, 2015 maybe, I used Grammarly, it was interesting but not much better than my standard spell checker. I used it for a while, in time I found it was a pain and slow, so I removed it.

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Bustin Rust - Creaky Old Skills Need Oil

Tableau Logo

In 2015 I spent a lot of time in Tableau and Tableau Public. I did some makeover Mondays. Very excited and passionate about the tool. However, I was repeatedly frustrated trying to get data into Tableau. As a hobbyist Data Geek, I couldn’t afford Altova, Mulesoft or Alteryx. I tried Pentaho Kettle, but the community version was just too buggy.

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Project Management - Using MoSCOWX

Last year I went to a talk during the Tri-agile conference about Business Analysis. I have been in an Agile environment for a number of years, but we didn’t use MoSCoW to rank features. Intriguing but I didn’t think about it much until my annual Evernote review.

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Learning From the Top Down

Like many people, when exploring a new topic I get ‘Ah Ha!’ moments. I had one last night while watching the first lesson video of the fast.ai deep learning course. At about 30 minutes in Jeremy mentions learning from the top down vs bottom up.

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A Busy Weekend of Hobby Coding

Late last week I was assigned to code and process a bunch of invoices. Rather than spend work hours automating it with python, I used my ‘kids are still asleep’ time. While not complete, I am happy with my progress with importing pdf invoices into python. My end goal is to export the data/itemized list to excel (because that is the format that our accounting department speaks).

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My Thoughts on Rust

Rust-Lang Logo

I have been interested in Rust for about a year, in January 2017 I went through to about chapter 4 of The Book. I found Rust very enjoyable, different in its compiled-ness, attractive in its toolchain and stunningly fast to run. I described rust to a coworker.

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Code Macros in Atom Editor - Snippets

Ever notice in Atom Editor that when you start typing common code constructions, it tries to auto-complete the rest of the block. For instance in Python if you start typing ‘ifmain’ it completes with:

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Tracking Changes

As notes for my self, I am tracking changes that I make to the CSS, _config.yml and other files. While I could probably unravel them using GitHub, if I choose to move to a new theme it will probably come in handy to have docs in a more readable format.

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A victim of Timor Crispus Adstringit

While not professionally diagnosed, I am sure I have a case of Timor Crispus Adstringit. My case may be mild, but I have deep empathy for any that may suffer a more acute or persistent affliction. Until yesterday I thought I had overcome Timor Crispus Adstringit since I can do this with no ill effects:

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