One fine day in the morning of 28 March 2020 Singapore time, I came across a tweet from PyLadies calling for lightning talk submissions for their International Women's Month Lightning Talks Zoom call. Just a day ago, my data scientist friend mentioned about Numba on Facebook, and I happened to have spoken quite a bit about Numba in my first conference talk last year.

Year 2020 started out bad. Real bad. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a string of cancellations for tech events (including PyCon) and travel restrictions. As a result of travel restrictions and Business Continuity Plans, many speakers were not able to deliver their talks in person at the eleventh hour, participation was greatly reduced by around 90%, and even the FOSSASIA organizers could not make it to the venue in person due to COVID-19 restrictions. Still, the organizers made the decision to proceed with the event with a mix of offline and online talks with live streaming and chats.

As a data engineer, part of my daily work involves performing data processing and manipulation on raw data into data that is ready for analysis. As my development team primarily uses Python for our data science workflow, we often use Pandas to perform operations and transformations on datasets before analysing the data. While we primarily use Pandas for data cleaning and engineering as part of the data science process, sometimes we also have to perform complex data transformations to obtain actionable insights that business users can leverage on to improve their processes.

It started out as a weekend coding exploration of real-time data from the Data.gov.sg APIs, but went on to become something more. 2nd iteration of the talk - given at JuniorDevSG

At the start of 2019, I set a goal to speak at a tech event. By the end of 2019, I've spoken at 2 tech meetups and 2 conferences. Here's my journey from wide-eyed event attendee to tech conference speaker, and lessons learnt along the way.

It started out as a weekend coding exploration of real-time data from the Data.gov.sg APIs, but went on to become something more.

I use pandas daily, maybe even hourly. I spend time reading the docs, but end up finding my answers on StackOverflow. What better way to mark my first year as a data engineer by contributing to the docs for pandas?

To mark my first year as a data engineer, I started thinking "How can I contribute back to the community that enables my work for the past year?" I came across an open issue on documentation for pandas, a popular open-source Python library for data analysis and manipulation, and decided to give it a try. Here's a work-in-progress developer log on the lessons learnt through contributing documentation to an open-source Python library for the first time - and how contributing to open-source projects is not as scary as it might seem to be.

Dependency management is important, as packages depend on versions of other core packages in order to run as intended. Typically in a Python project, dependencies are downloaded using a requirements.txt file, which lists the packages and their dependencies as a flat file. While the package versions are included in the requirements.txt file, the dependency relationships are not explicitly stated.

My development team has been using GitLab on-premise to manage their code repositories. As we are moving development work to our new on-premise development cloud with expanded processing capabilities, we also need to migrate our code repositories to the new development cloud which uses Azure DevOps Team Foundation Server (TFS) for Git workflows. To support the chief architect in the migration, I prepared a quick migration guide for the team's move to Azure DevOps TFS.

I did a little talk on how to make your data processing faster as my first-ever conference talk, and it was loads of fun. Toasts, coffee and a barista included in the talk. Oh, and did I mention that it was also my first-ever CFP submission?

Sometimes, we just can't make things run indefinitely faster on a single worker.

Keeping codes and configuration files in sync between client machine and remote server used to be a drawn-out exercise in personal responsibility via SFTP/SCP. VS Code Remote Development looks to change that - for the better. Here's my notes on VS Code Remote Development.

In a data science project, one of the biggest bottlenecks (in terms of time) is the constant wait for the data processing code to finish executing. Sometimes, the gigantic execution times even end up making the project infeasible and often forces a data scientist to work with only a subset of the entire dataset, depriving the data scientist of insights and performance improvements that could be obtained with a larger dataset.