Todd Birchard

I've had a few strongly worded opinions about Java as a language in the past. Be that as it may, choosing a programming language is a luxury that many people don’t have; as long as enterprises...

I've spent the majority of my life dreading an eternal question that governs our lives. You know the one. It's the one that comes after our ritualistic handshakes and "nice to meet you"s....

So far in our SQLAlchemy journey, we've covered managing database connections and model creation. So... how do we actually extract the data we want from our database?SQLAlchemy's ORM query API...

There are plenty of good reasons to use SQLAlchemy, from managing database connections, to easy integrations with libraries such as Pandas. If you're in the app-building business, I'd be willing to...

We've had quite a journey exploring the magical world of PySpark together. After covering DataFrame transformations, structured streams, and RDDs, there are only so many things left to cross off the...

I recently worked on a project which combined two of my life's greatest passions: coding, and memes. The project was, of course, a chatbot: a fun imaginary friend who sits in your chatroom of choice...

It seems like almost every data-heavy Python shop is using Airflow in some way these days. It shouldn't take much time in Airflow's interface to figure out why: Airflow is the missing piece data...

I've been wandering into a lot of awkward conversations lately, most of them being about how I spend my free time. Apparently "rifling through Python library documentation in hopes of finding...

When building we build applications that handle users, a lot of functionality depends on storing session variables for users. Consider a typical checkout cart: it's quite often that an abandoned cart...

Summer is just around the corner and everybody seems to be asking the same question: “does my data look... out of shape?” Whether you’re a scientist or an engineer, data-image dysmorphia can...

Now that we're comfortable with Spark DataFrames, we're going to implement this newfound knowledge to help us implement a streaming data pipeline in PySpark. As it turns out, real-time data streaming...

There's a bit of a headache going around in respect to global npm permissions. For those of us working on Unix-based systems, it's not uncommon to come across error messages like this:npm WARN...

Data engineering technology stacks have a relatively sizeable amount of variance across companies. Depending on the skills and languages preferred by a company's developers, a data stack might be...

There are plenty of good libraries for charting data in Python, perhaps too many. Plotly is great, but a limit of 25 free charts is hardly a starting point. Sure, there's Matplotlib, but surely we...

If you joined us last time, you should have some working knowledge of how to get started with PySpark by using a Databricks notebook. Armed with that knowledge, we can now start playing with real...

Something we've only begun to touch on so far is the benefit of utilizing Apache Spark is larger-scale data pipelines. Spark is a quintessential part of the Apache data stack: built atop of Hadoop,...

Last we chatted, we walked through the process of getting started with Jupyter notebooks on a Ubuntu server. The classic Jupyter notebook interface is certainly well-suited to the job done. That...

We’ve covered a lot of Flask goodness in this series thus far. We fully understand how to structure a sensible application; we can serve up complex page templates, and have dived into interacting...

Something we haven't done just yet on this site is walking through the humble process of creating data pipelines: the art of taking a bunch of data, changing said data, and putting it somewhere else....

Last week we encountered a genuine scenario when working with GraphQL clients. When building real applications consuming data via GraphQL, we usually don't know precisely the query we're going to...

Aggregate functions in SQL are super dope. When combining these functions with clauses such as GROUP BY and HAVING, we discover ways to view our data from completely new perspectives. Instead of...