Life in the neighborhood

I’ve worked from home since 1998. All along I’ve hoped many more people would enjoy the privilege and share in the benefits. Now that it’s finally happening, and seems likely to c…

The (appropriately) quantified self

A year after we moved to northern California I acquired a pair of shiny new titanium hip joints. There would be no more running for me. But I’m a lucky guy who gets to to bike and hike more t…

The Postgres REPL

R0ml Lefkowitz’s The Image of Postgres evokes the Smalltalk experience: reach deeply into a running system, make small changes, see immediate results. There isn’t yet a fullblown IDE fo…

Postgres set-returning functions that self-memoize as materialized views

In episode 2 I mentioned three aspects of pl/python that are reasons to use it instead of pl/pgsql: access to Python modules, metaprogramming, and introspection. In episode 5 I discussed metaprogra…

pl/python metaprogramming

In episode 2 I mentioned three aspects of pl/python that are reasons to use it instead of pl/pgsql: access to Python modules, metaprogramming, and introspection. Although this episode focuses on me…

The Tao of Unicode Sparklines

I’ve long been enamored of the sparkline, a graphical device which its inventor Edward Tufte defines thusly: A sparkline is a small intense, simple, word-sized graphic with typographic resolu…

A beautiful power tool to scrape, clean, and combine data

Labels like “data scientist” and “data journalist” connote an elite corps of professionals who can analyze data and use it to reason about the world. There are elite practit…

Working with Postgres types

In episode 2 of this series I noted that the languages in which I’m writing Postgres functions share a common type system. It took me a while to understand how types work in the context of Po…