I've been kicking around this thought for a year or so now - to the outsider a career in data looks like a technical path. The data practitioner learns SQL, how to query data stored in a database somewhere using SQL, and if you know enough SQL you can answer any question whose artifacts are stored in that database somewhere.

The reality is that SQL is the very last mile. SQL is code, and so it looks to the non-practitioner like the act of creation, like code written in any imperative...

So I'm back in the writing code game after 4 years off. I started a new position about 2 months ago as "director of data engineering" at Platform.sh. It only took ten years longer than originally planned but I have finally unlocked the "some kind of engineering mgmt at an actual tech company" badge.

I'll get into what I'm doing maybe later, but right now I want to leave a breadcrumb for my past self regarding looping over tasks in Prefect.

I'm just kind of tinkering with pulling info...

I recently rebuilt this site (again, I think this is v9 now) into Rails and Postgres. I was moving out of Drupal, so there was a significant downsizing of the database, and some pretty painless migration of the data. Once again, I used the Sequel gem to write the migration script to pull out the posts and related data that gets scattered hither and yon in Drupal's database. That was the easy part.

I did all of this over a period of about two weeks and it was joyous, painless, and fun. I...

I was on the phone with Mom yesterday, and we got to talking about technology - a thing that actually happens fairly frequently. Being an only kid, she's genuinely interested in everything that I do and it's been helpful to have someone who's mostly non-technical to bounce explanations off of when I'm getting my head around a new piece of gear.

The piece of gear that I was explaining the other day was something called Mongo DB. Mongo's parent company is called 10gen, and they landed on...

I've been a Media Temple customer for a long while now, almost 4 years. The file system on my grid server is a timeline of my learning programming and systems administration. I mostly work on big-boy systems over the last 2 years or so, so my comfort level with working through SSH is pretty high now (much higher than working through GUI tools that want to hold your hand, actually). That's one thing that I always loved about MT - the fact that they give you a pretty decent command line...

This is part of an IRC transcript between a buddy and I, wherein I try to explain a little bit about how the internet works and why knowing at least a little bit of database theory will go a long way in demystifying learning how to build stuff. (It's a technical term.) He's trying to learn a bit about Drupal and about how you build sites with it, so I'm going to tag him in on a project for a friend of mine who runs a yoga studio. Hers was the first site I ever built, in Wordpress. I've...