Thanks to my experience with the ETL job I maintain, I’ve sort of become “the scripting person” on my team. On one hand, it’s a good thing because I’m good at it and I know what I’m doing. But on the other hand, it’s important to grow and I should…

Okay the title is misleading for a couple of reasons: I didn’t really learn about protobuf this week. I started using it weeks ago but never felt confident enough to write a post about it. Also I haven’t really learned about it because I am *struggling*. This isn’t too different…

Since the last time I wrote about Terraform, I’ve been blessed to have avoided too many challenging problems with the framework. In truth, I had a few teammates who took it upon themselves to become infra experts, which insulated me from having to dig too deep into this part of…

One would think that since I have spent over a year working on a Python script that writes data to CSVs, I would understand the basics of Python file writers. But if you’ve been a loyal read of this blog, you know that it’s never safe to assume I know…

Over the past few months, I’ve spent more time working on back end processes than my usual Python script work. You might know that the script in question reads a series of Postgres tables to determine the data each client wants in their specific report. Now, I’m maintaining a Java…

At work, we’ve designed a Postgres table that uses JSON as one of its column types. The idea was that we wanted to use the data in that column to conditionally trigger features from a script. We could have made each json property into its own column or table, but…

Loyal readers know that I do a lot of work with reading and writing to an SFTP. Files in an SFTP are meant to be secure, so there will always be protocols in place to authenticate users before they can be read. Users commonly use a username and password combination…

The Python testing continues! This past week, one of my fellow Solutions Engineers shared a PR that mocks a DB, which is new for a lot of us. It’ll be important to write more of those tests in the future, so I’ve got to do the legwork to try and…

It finally happened, we’re writing tests for the product that constantly breaks. It seems like an obvious move, but most readers have probably experienced deprioritizing a security measure in favor of work that will “move the needle.” …