This post is part of a 3 part series that uses a spreadsheet to answer the following question: can you retire? The 3 parts are as follows: Part 1: Can I retire? Part 2: Optimising your Expenses Part 3: Optimising your Income Introduction Before I start, this post is not about investment advice. There are a lot of resources out in the web for that, and investments is something I cannot claim to be an expert in....
This post is part of a 3 part series that uses a spreadsheet to answer the following question: can you retire? The 3 parts are as follows: Part 1: Can I retire? Part 2: Optimising your Expenses Part 3: Optimising your Income Introduction Welcome to Part 2 of the series Can I retire? In this part we will expand on the original post, and tackle with much more detail the expenses section of your spreadsheet....
This post is part of a 3 part series that uses a spreadsheet to answer the following question: can you retire? The 3 parts are as follows: Part 1: Can I retire? Part 2: Optimising your Expenses Part 3: Optimising your Income Introduction In this post I will walk you through how you can look at where you stand right now in your finances, and help you decide if (1) you will be able to retire right now, and if not (2) what you need to do to finally retire....
Given that we want to execute certain service tasks in Camunda directly, is there a noticeable difference in performance when using different implementations? What is Camunda? And what is a Service Task For those unfamiliar with the platform, Camunda is an open-sourced engine that allows you to design processes using visual diagrams. These visual diagrams are represented using a specification called BPMN, or Business Process Model Notation. BPMN Diagrams provide an alternative to designing and implementing processes in code....
LocalStack is an open-sourced server application that lets developers emulate Amazon AWS Services on their local development environment. It can be used as part of one’s development environment, but also as a way to support the running of E2E tests, first in the local environment, then in the CI pipeline. LocalStack in the local environment E2E tests are usually run in the local environment first, and in this case all we need to do is simply make LocalStack available for use on localhost....
Introduction In this post, we want to evaluate the memory footprint in Python 3 of data stored in various tabular formats. In particular, we want to compare DataFrames, to JSON-like data structures like List of Dictionaries, and Dictionaries of Lists. The above are 3 different ways to store table-like data. Table-like data is basically data represented by rows and columns. In this examination, we will ignore any questions regarding efficient read/write or lookups....
I became very intrigued with Metaflow because of its DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) approach to building ML models, which seems rather intuitive when you think of a machine learning model as a series of processing steps. However, I did have one big concern when it came to Metaflow – production deployment. As it currently stands, production deployment with Metaflow seems highly coupled to AWS. This is a problem to me, because my personal preference is to self-host using my own dev-ops setup....
Dec 2022 Edit – Due to a significant amount of interest, readers can find a ready-made PyPI package here. Introduction Building efficient event buses requires strong support for parallel processing. This is because scalable event buses usually require multiple events be fired in parallel, and these events should not block each other’s execution during extended input-output (I/O) operations. Python is by default single-threaded, using a single core for processing. This means that building an event bus in python used to require the heavy use of multithreading, with its attendant complexities and pitfalls....
Problem How do we run an asynchronous function in a synchronous script? Python’s await async syntax can be a real life-saver when it comes to running highly concurrent code in a performant manner. However, sometimes we just want to call an asynchronous function synchronously. Maybe we have a small application where performance is not a big issue, or we just want to reuse some async functions in an experimental script. In such situations we do not want to rewrite the whole implementation to use only an asynchronous approach....
In this post we look at 4 different kinds of conversation engines that can be used for chatbots. The kind you choose to use can determine the power and flexibility of your final product — and ultimately how scalable it will be in handling diverse and myriad conversational flows. What is a conversation engine? To explain this, first we first have to understand a little about how chatbots work. Chatbots are software constructs that accept any kind of text input from users, with the intention of returning a reply, usually some kind of information that users are interested in....