Posts

jeffrey k eliasen

technologist philosopher agent of change

Diffing Gianted Sorted Files in Python

Today I ran across an interesting problem: I need to find the differences between two “extremely large” .csv files. The files are database snapshots from different points in time, and I am looking for “upserts” (lines that are new or changed) and ignoring the rest. For the purposes of this post, deletes are handled separately.
Thoughts About Usability vs. Risk

Most of the world now knows about the mistaken emergency alert sent out in the state of Hawaii last Saturday morning:
Testing Call Order in Python's Mock Module

Today I had to test something I’d never needed to test before… the order of calls in a validation method mattered, and I wanted a unit test to confirm I never break this in the future.
Friday Afternoon Dancing

Just in case your day isn’t complete without a little twerking Spider-Man:
Really Fast

OK, this is just flat-out cool. This is a production car that set a land-speed record (not yet verified by Guiness, but still) of 277 mph on regular roads. The first run tops out at about 270, the second run peaks at over 284.
Learning to Learn

Machine learning is (clearly) one of the fundamental shifts affecting humanity today, but it is also very confusing to explain. I have tried several times to distill it to it’s essence but generally not succeed.