Work

We are  having a hackathon! I’m excited.  Its my first since Music Hack Day NYC. We’re going to try out Amazon Lex, Lambda, and some containers.

Some folks are already using my code for working with ELK, so that’s nice.

I’ve been focusing around automating my testing and such, and I really am centering around just learning to write better makefiles. Make is installed everywhere, like vim and other things I like. It just works. And makefiles do almost everything you want. The downside is that it is an ugly syntax. The upside is that if you learn one ugly syntax, you don’t need to learn everything about Rake, Yarn, etc.

Around the web

Best Practices for Staging Environments – this article by the excellent Alice Goldfuss came up at work as we wrestle with big calcs and datasets for our clients.

Why you hate Contemporary Architecture – This is grrrreat. One little note for the computer nerds. If you’ve heard of the Gang of 4 Design Patterns book, read the article and come back. The Design Patterns book was based in part on Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language” which is a great guide to things that seem to work in architecture.

I discovered two things that similar to a POC I was working on (voracious-etl)

• Datasette provides a readonly JSON api for any SQLite DB.
• Dataset provides an ORM for any CSV or JSON file

The plugin system at the core of pytest is a library: Pluggy. I like that and I might use it earlier.

A good podcast: Flash Forward. Explores a new future every week. The most recent focuses on fungal enslavement, which I love. If you like that one, I highly recommend the mindblowing Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer or Sensation by Nick Mamatas

Politics

None of the big progressive candidates made it in the democratic primaries. Cuomo still won. Tish won, which is OK. However, I see that  some progressive candidates made it through.

I hope they can do some real work and win in November. I’ll be calling and doing work to support them.  I long for a day when I can start moaning about free speech vs hate speech and trying to reign in some liberal excesses. However, right now, the work has to get done.

I also note that children are still in cages and parents are getting deported without hearings, but it isn’t in the headlines anymore. I’m still pissed about it. I’m still pissed that the probable governor of NY seems to only work for progressive issues when pushed and won’t use his clemency powers.

Exercise

I biked around 37 miles this week! Had to take off Monday and Tuesday due to rain and being pretty sick. But otherwise, I rode in. Got to stop on Christie street and help a guy who’d been knocked down by a cab.

Worked to a slightly lower pistol squat and my butt hurts sooo bad. Also, my dragon flag work is getting better. I can kind of hold it.

I started doing partial handstand pushups against the wall and they feel pretty good. I can do 5 at a time part way down and up. Next I’ll try lower and lower, then try freestanding ones.