Skip to content

A Data Scientist Blog

A homemade replacement for mkdocstrings

In these days I am tidying up the documentation of a legacy codebase, where "legacy" stands for something in between spaghetti code and "things I wish I've done differently". Since I wish the output of the work to be as much complete as possible, I decided to include also the source code in the new docs built with mkdocs-material.

The go-to choice could have been mkdocstrings, but I wanted to avoid some setup complexity1 so I wrote down a custom source code collector.

  • in Guides
  • 6 min read

A visual comparison of AWS Certifications

Following my previous post, the quest for AWS Certifications continues.

In this episode, my goal is to quantitatively compare the three Associate certifications I'm focusing on: Solutions Architect, Developer and Data Engineer. So, I did some scraping to extract the exhaustive list of AWS services in scope for each certifications for the time being.

  • in Guides
  • 4 min read

AWS Certification Skill Tree

As a professional with more than 4 years of experience with AWS, I might attempt to get an AWS Certification sooner or later this year, so I'm evaluating all the possibilities out there.

AWS itself provides a useful guide to the recommended AWS Certification Paths, where all the top cloud job roles are listed together with a bried description of their responsibilities.

Even if such a resource is more than welcome, I find that the big picture is not as clear as it should be: I decided to help myself building a skill tree with the aid of the awesome diagrams.

  • in TIL
  • 3 min read

All you need is closure

Decorators are well known examples of Python syntactic sugar, which basically let you change the behaviour of a function without modifying its definition, thanks to a handy syntax based on the @ symbol followed by the decorator name, everything put just above your function definition.

Sometimes, however, you can't exploit this syntax, for example because you don't have the function definition at your disposal - let's think at the case in which the function you want to decorate lives in another codebase (the latter might be one of the libraries your project depends on).

  • in TIL
  • 1 min read

Convert a markdown file to docx with pandoc

Today I rediscover an amazing tool: pandoc, which correctly presents itself as

your swiss-army knife to convert files from one markup format into another.

In these days I am working on the redaction of a complex tender notice, which must be delivered as an editable docx and then exported (with all the fancy stuff and theming) into pdf. Unfortunately, I find the user experience of writing documents with Microsoft Word really unsatisfying and cluttered.

  • in TIL
  • 1 min read

Terminal User Interface

If you have an already up-and-running Typer app, you might want to extend it to some sort of GUI (Graphical User Interface).

While building a full GUI can be time-consuming, there is a really fast utility which can be adopted to get somewhere in between.