Mark Nagelberg’s Blog

How to Make Decisions: A Mental Framework and 5 Common Failures September 28, 2019
Whether you like it or not, you are faced with a barrage of decisions every day. Human beings are essentially decision machines, and the quality of your life hinges on these choices you make. The better you are at it, the better your life will be. Some decisions are low stakes. Sometimes, the stakes are […]
Mark Nagelberg
Take your Python Skills to the Next Level With Fluent Python September 10, 2019
You’ve been programming in Python for a while, and although you know your way around dicts, lists, tuples, sets, functions, and classes, you have a feeling your Python knowledge is not where it should be. You have heard about “pythonic” code and yours falls short. You’re an intermediate Python programmer. You want to move to […]
Mark Nagelberg
Syncing your Jupyter Notebook Charts to Microsoft Word Reports December 2, 2018
Here’s the situation: You’re doing a big data analysis in your Jupyter Notebook. You’ve got tons of charts and you want to report on them. Ideally, you’d create your final report in the Jupyter notebook itself, with all its fancy markdown features and the ability to keep your code and reporting all in the same place. […]
Mark Nagelberg
Building a Rare Event Reporting System in Python (Part 1 – Crunching Historical Data to Determine What is Unusual) November 21, 2018
Here’s the situation: you have a dataset where each row represents some type of event and the time it occurred. You want to build a system to let you know if there were unusual events occurring in some time period (a common application). You also want your users to be able to explore the events […]
Mark Nagelberg
Getting Started with Airflow Using Docker November 1, 2018
Lately I’ve been reading intensively on data engineering after being inspired by this great article by Robert Chang providing an introduction to the field. The underlying message of the article really resonated with me: when most people think of data science they immediately think about the stuff being done by very mature tech companies like […]
Mark Nagelberg
Deploying and Maintaining a Web App Part 3: Adding Tests with Pytest October 14, 2018
Testing is an important part of development, including developing web applications. Among other benefits, they increase your confidence that your web application is doing what you expect, and a provide a basis for preventing bugs in an automated way when you make changes to your code. Since testing is such an integral part of web […]
Mark Nagelberg
Digging into Data Science Tools: Docker October 1, 2018
Docker is a tool for creating and managing “containers” which are like little virtual machines where you can run your code. A Docker container is like a little Linux OS, preinstalled with everything you need to run your web app, machine learning model, script, or any other code you write. Docker containers are like a […]
Mark Nagelberg
Creating PDF Reports with Python, Pdfkit, and Jinja2 Templates September 16, 2018
Once in a while as a data scientist, you may need to create PDF reports of your analyses. This seems somewhat “old school” nowadays, but here are a couple situations why you might want to consider it: You need to make reports that are easily printable. People often want “hard copies” of particular reports they […]
Mark Nagelberg
Deploying and Maintaining a Web App Part 2: Setting up the Database and App Configuration August 21, 2018
It is good practice when developing a web application to set up different environments for deploying changes. The number and nature of environments that are used can vary, but we’ll be using the following commonplace architecture: Development Environment: Where you develop the web application, typically on your local machine. Testing Environment: Where you perform tests […]
Mark Nagelberg
Workflow to Deploy and Maintain a Web App August 6, 2018
In this series, I’m going to work through the process of deploying and maintaining a simple web application. The goal is for you to get an understanding of all the steps that may be involved in deploying a web app and maintaining it in production with modern tools and techniques. To follow along in this […]
Mark Nagelberg

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Posted on September 16, 2019Full size 16 × 16

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