At my last job we used pyodbc to manage database interactions in a few different projects. We did this because we interacted with 5 different relational databases, and not all of them had native driver libraries for Python. In addition to this our use of pyodbc meant that we had a nice consistent database API for on-boarding, or when somebody needed to interact with a database that might be new to them for their project. Recently though I had somebody ask me what ODBC was, and to be honest I didn’t have a good answer. I’ve used ODBC libraries in multiple languages, but I hadn’t really dug into the nuts and bolts of what it was because I hadn’t needed to. I knew enough to use it, it worked well and there were bigger problems to solve. It’s a good question though. What is ODBC?

This is out of date, I have since switched to self hosting gitea and AWS.

I’ve been using Vim as my primary editor for a few months now. Recently I wanted to revisit some project work in Rust, but I hadn’t setup any tooling in Vim for rust yet. The first couple of hits I got on Google were great resources that I’ll provide links to, but they were also over a year old, so while using them as a starting point I’m documenting my setup since some things have changed from 2017.

This morning I was setting up a RHEL 7 box for development using my normal dot files, but when I was ready to sit down and start working on my project I noticed I got an error from You Complete Me letting me know that the version of vim that was installed wasn’t compatible. After checking EPEL for a more up to date install I decided to try pulling vim from source and building it myself.

If you’ve spent time using Python for ETL processes or working with data pipelines using tools from the Apache ecosystem then you’ve probably heard about Apache Airflow. In this post I’m going to briefly write about why I’m using Airflow, show how you can get started with Airflow using docker and I will show how I customized this setup so that you can do the same. Finally at the end I’ll talk about a couple of issues I ran into getting started with Airflow and docker.