Programming

Introduction For the last decade, I have been using Chocolatey as my package manager on Windows. I recently needed to install software on a new machine, and decided that now was an ideal time to revisit some popular package managers and perhaps make a switch. One of my favorite benefits of package managers is the ability to install software in a consistent way across a variety of different applications. Having a command line tool with remote repositories of current versions of software makes it easy to keep applications up to date. Finally, it makes them easy to remove in a unified way should they no longer be needed. When setting up a new machine, the ability to have a script that installs most if not all the applications that I will need on that machine using such a tool is also highly beneficial. ...

Introduction Python Pandas is a powerful package used by data scientists to analyze data. My recent use case was far more pedestrian. I had one vendor that was providing a data file in Excel format, and another vendor that needed to consume that data in a completely different schema as a CSV file. As is often the case, the file I was receiving was formed oddly. I’m sure you can relate. The primary problem was that the columns were not all defined. They were unnamed and formatted for some previously defined form, such that the first column might be a person’s name, the second column might be the first line of the address, or a second person’s name. ...