Professional Text File Editor. Amateur Tooter.
Somewhere between Gen Z, Millennial, and Very Confused šš»š„.
Software Engineer working mostly with #python #golang and #postgresql at Sensible Weather.
Blog posts redirect from https://gerardbentley.com
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@gar
had some fun hacking around with #postgres text search on some #seattle data.
here's a streamlit + golang + postgres stack for lookups of emergency food locations.
walkthrough-ish: https://home.gerardbentley.com/guides/golang_postgres_streamlit_stack/
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@gar
Whoever wrote and approved the #golang date-> string format function must have been on quite a trip
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@gar
Chatted with a friend working on mitigating social harm from tech and once we started getting into "an intimate threat actor already has access to the phone" I remembered why I don't want to go into security...
Privacy is so hard to get right
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@gar
Been quite a day of #yakshaving on my personal setups, but happy to have gotten my blog update up onto github pages (https://home.gerardbentley.com/) with a build helper script for jupyter notebooks.
Also excited to connect my gotosocial instance to S3 storage, but disassociated all of my old media files in the process :(
Linode block storage didn't seem to work out of the box, but AWS is going fine; now to rip all those little jpegs out of my old vps!
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@gar
Having a lot of fun porting my blog and old notes from various iterations into mkdocs!
To get some of the Fastpages benefits for jupyter notebook I started a script that uses ānbconvertā to export .ipynb to markdown files!
Thereās a different flow (cell tags) to hide certain cells or outputs, but thatās alright.
I also had to write a small preprocessor to embed base64 images instead of the default behaviour trying to link pngs
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@gar
Looking back on 2022
Old Job
Working in mortgage finance industry showed me the reasons I donāt want to work with Windows, or Excel, or mainframesā¦
But it did give me a bunch of Python data pipelining skills and exposure to what it takes to convert an organization to a data warehouse over Postgres.
New Job
Moved into the climatetech / fintech space with Sensible Weather and enjoying contributing to a profit center rather than cost center.
Stretching me to learn Golang for web services, which has been a good addition to the toolkit.
Old Blog
To give me confidence in job searching I started a new blog.
This version was with Fastpages, which has some special handling for converting jupyter notebooks to Jekyll blog pages.
I converted a few old markdown blog entries and wanted to write new posts for side projects and explorations.
The past years have been a lot about finding what niches of software really excite me (which is a variety!).
Python as a backend and data engineering and scripting and pseudocoding language is my current comfort.
While a language is only a tool, itās been great to be familiar with it as Iāve explored Time Series and Geospatial data this year.
New Blog
New Year, New Blog Framework.
Going with Mkdocs Material and will likely join the sponsor program to get insider access to the official blog plugin.
Fastpages has a bit too much surrounding setup for me to feel in control and mkdocs has some fantastic support for customization and extension out of the box.
Iāll probably still use something to convert Jupyter notebooks into markdown, but thatās still up in the air.
Iām also interested in a strong search, since Iād still like to accumulate knowledge of frontend topics and general know-how on how to set up and deploy systems in different environments.
But I want my blog topics to have a more focused curation.
Maybe.
Who knows where itāll go in a year.
Old Side Projects
While Iām beginning to appreciate the usecases for splitting webservices up into separate deployments, I think I learned to create applications in a generation of extreme over-engineering.
I thought to have a shot at getting a job I had to be able to:
So struggling through side projects came with a lot of cognitive thrashing trying to learn multiple things at once and not a lot of feeling of progress.
New Side Projects
I think I signed up for Streamlit beta after I saw it on reddit, but didnāt open it until a mentor suggested I use it for teaching students.
After some success with students creating impressive demos, I got used to using it on my own.
A handful of gif demos are on my github page, but the main point is I decided to abandon complexity and focus on learning.
I made an OCR app backed by AWS text services, then later discovered EasyOCR and plugged that in instead.
I wouldnāt want to make changes like that in a highly complicated project, but when working on one or two files it is easy to experiment.
I started working with more tabular and time series data and explored DuckDB and Apache Arrow, then since joining a climatetech company Iāve been playing with Spatialite, PostGIS, and GeoPandas.
Old Achievements
I put up 17 blog posts on my Fastpages based blog this past year and 3 videos on Youtube.
I shared 13 projects on Twitter and the Streamlit Forum and probably hacked away at a dozen others.
I joined the open source Streamlit Creators group and got an article published on the Streamlit blog.
New Achievements
I plan to create more videos this year on Youtube.
If short videos seem to help the next generation of engineers I want to see what niches are relying on TikTok.
I want to blog more about geospatial topics as I learn more.
Geoparquet and DuckDB-Geospatial support are still in very early days.
Any climate or energy or population modeling relies on these kinds of computations.
I hope to stick with this single mkdocs deployment for my blog for at least a year.
I do have a fun idea to combine it with a Pocketbase based user / event store for making a lightweight Learning Management System of sorts.
