;TLDR A thought provoking book for seasoned analysts and business leaders that have slowly lost sight of their true purpose.

;TLDR - Loved it. A good, tool agnostic overview of many disciplines of data visualization.

One of the closing questions for Micheal Kennedy’s Talk Python to Me podcast is “What editor do you use?” In the last year or so the answer has frequently been VSCode. In the recently released 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey VSCode took over the top spot as the editor of choice.

Every year Analytics Forward is one of my favorite conferences. This is my 4th year in a row attending.

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.

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.

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.

The Q2 Pydata Triangle Meetup featured Peter Baumgartner from RTI. I have shared my notes below.

These are my quick notes from the April 16th TriPython meetup.

My notes from the April 11th meeting of TriNug. I don’t go to many TriNug events, but the topic for this one was too close to where I want to go with services and jobs at work… If it runs in less than 5 minutes and we can do it in C# or Java, then function should be the first option - not the last.

My biggest take away from Hit Refresh is (I am paraphrasing here) ‘Change must come from within.’

Yesterday I had a full day with an early meeting with a provider, then the drive to Raleigh for Triagile 2018.

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.

Mattew Mccormick from Kitware presented ITK - Insight Tool Kit in Jupyter Notebooks at the March Tripython meetup. During his talk he featured a handful of Jupyter tools for working with 2D and 3D visualizations.

‘Too Many Bars?’ was the title of the talk given by Xan Gregg at yesterday’s Analytics Forward conference. Below are my notes with some examples from a blog post Xan wrote on Packed Bar Charts.

This is my 3rd Analytics Forward. It is always a good conference, even more so now that I know so many people in the community.

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.

While working on the post for Jupyter Notebooks on Azure I noticed an NBextensions tab I had never noticed when running a local Jupyter Notebook server.

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.

Took some notes at the Pydata meetup tonight.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Below are my notes from last night’s meet up with Deep Learning RTP. The presentation was an overview of Fast.ai - Practical Deep Learning for Coders MOOC. I remember the organizer pitching the course last year at a Pydata meetup. The group seemed to learn a lot in a good way in a short amount of time.

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).

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.

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:

Initial posts I found about enabling https with a custom domain on GitHub Pages were from 2014 and seemed overly complex. However, the process has become very easy with Cloudflare.

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.

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:

It started with a blog post by Ian Lurie in September 2016. At the time I had a workflow of feedly -> pocket -> evernote. That post made it to evernote with a tag to revisit.