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I have a confession to make: I’m a stickler for filenames. I wholeheartedly believe that all filenames and paths should be kebab case or snake case. Spaces, capitalization, and non-alphanumeric characters drive me nuts.

Data analysis of sensor data is a typical hardware engineering activity that often involves an Excel-based workflow. While Excel (and other spreadsheet tools) are great for quick and dirty, one-off analyses, a Python + pandas workflow can really takes things to the next level.

Once upon a time, at McGill University in Mechanical Engineering, I took a course called COMP 208 Computer Programming for Physical Sciences and Engineering. The goal was to give us future hardware engineers a foundation in programming, to allow us to automate, perform advanced calculations, and solve our engineering problems through code.

For the majority of my career I’ve worked at small companies. It’s not uncommon that in addition to engineering I also have to play the role of IT specialist. In this role, there have been a few occurrences of being locked out of a Windows PC (often due to an employee leaving the company and have no IT offboarding process).

Infinite values can occur more often than people expect, especially for calculated data. For example, in a recent post I calculated the Twitter Follower-Friend ratio by dividing the followers_count series by the friends_count series.

While scrolling through my Twitter feed recently, I began to get a little annoyed at the amount of content that I was simply not interested in. In engineering terms, my signal-to-noise ratio was way too low.

Poetry is my current favourite packaging and dependency management tool for Python. It combines dependency resolution, virtual environments, and packing all into one easy to use tool. However, my one big complaint at the moment is the lack of synchronization between my package version (defined in pyproject.

Sometimes you need access to your calendar data, such as when making synchronization tools. In my particular case, I use my calendar as a high-level time-tracking tool which I then sync with Clockify using their API.