Ben Wendt's blog

Some Anti-virus software will monitor that certain key files, for example important binaries or the kernel, have not been modified.

Dask distributed is a python package / distributed processing framework that gives the ability to parallelize code execution across a cluster.

Unit testing your code is the ultimate route to developer sanity.

Using the BLEMidi.h library, you can get your esp32, the goat of dev boards, to be a midi server (instrument), or client (it’s complicated).

Cookie clicker is a video game where the goal is to click a cookie many times.

Like everyone else, I do my best to read many books, and like many, I find it to be a challenge, not just in finding the time, but also I found after you’ve read enough books, especially non-fiction, a lot of the book seems like filler.

DBT has support for a wide variety of databases.

DBT supports hooks, which are a mechanism for running operations at different points of the execution of your DBT DAG.

DBT is a tool to simplify populating the relationships between different tables.

I had a visit with my mother recently where she introduced me to the idea of Sator Squares.

Just a quick note about an uninformative error I saw in bigquery the other day and was having trouble finding on google.

Beam has support for working with collections of data that conforms to a schema, and you can use SQL Transforms to transform this data.

I’ve written many times about solving wordle.

In a chain of method calls, what happens when one of the calls returns a null?

Ages ago I was working as a contractor on a data engineering team, working on a knowledge graph platform that was built on a service architecture.

I was preparing for something I needed to do at work with beam, namely running a shell command for something that isn’t possible to run natively in the beam runtime, and did not find much documentation for it.

After using spotify for many years, I decided to try switching my music service a few months ago.

At my new job our focus is to uncover scientific insights to accelerate and improve scientific research.

I’ve blogged several times about wordle before.

Apache Beam is a distributed programming framework, mostly designed as a counterpart to the DataFlow service in Google Cloud Platform.

Since late 2012, I’ve been a parent.

Since 2007 I’ve been keeping up my own personal word of the day blog.

Happy 2s Day.

One of the paper handouts my child used to do at school was the “word ladder.”

I had access to udemy courses back when I was working at Deloitte Digital.

My old work (TWG) had a 3D printer for employees to play with and use.

Wordle is a popular word deduction game.

When I was a child, they had a plotter at my mom’s office.

Non-negative matrix factorization is a fast technique for generating embeddings from a dataset.

The 100 emoji is iconic; it’s a symbol recognized across cultures and it has a semiotic impact globally.

I wrote a while back about a script I wrote to run on my android phone that would sort and archive any photos I had on the device into dated folders I have on a network drive.

I was super excited to find that I can install bash on my phone, then scp and ruby.

I was reading an article on Fizzbuzz.

Javascript is going to get a pipeline operator any day now, and I love working with it in elixir, so I thought I’d try to make one in ruby.

I tried using j for some of my advent of code puzzles.

I had an issue at work where some database writes were throwing errors within a thread, and the error was being silently eaten when the thread died.

Bayes’ theorem is a way of determining the likelihood of an event A given that another event B has occurred.

rein is a gem for adding database constraints in rails migrations.

I was talking to a colleague who was expounding about the coolness of elixir.

I am still working on picking up some elixir, so when a coworker mentioned that writing a Slack bot is cool, I decided to give that a try.

My work (TWG) has a 3D printer for employees to play with and use.

A coworker recently filled my ear with praise for vue.js.

Last month a workmate and I flew down to San Francisco to go to elasticon.

In irb, fork Now typing exit will not work because your keystrokes might go to either the parent process or the forked child process.

For my “I had trouble finding this on google” series, here’s a solution I found to getting a total duration from a collection of objects with durations stored as Time objects. total_duration = durations.reduce(Time.gm(2000)) do |total, time| total += ti…

Every programmer has some level of interest in knowing how to write a language.

My old “attach a camera to your RC car” tutorial has been republished into a “1-2-3 Projects” anthology by maker media.

If you need to only run some tasks on a certain subset of servers in your inventory, first add a role to your inventory file deploy/whatever-environment.rb: server '1.2.3.4', roles: %w{my_role} Now you can set up your command to run in one of your tasks in

I was playing around with the esoteric programming language brainfuck.

Watch me discuss how a search engine works.