My cowoker and I work release a heroku buildpack for duckdb. We’ve been using duckdb to do joins of geospatial data and it’s been incredibly useful.
I suggest creating a sample heroku app and get it working before you add it to anything in production.
Here’s a scenario that happened to my friend’s parents:
They bought a house in San Diego in the 1970s before they had kids. They paid around $20,000 for the house.
In the 1980s, after having kids, they moved to a bigger house in a different part of the county where the schools were better. The housing market was unusual in the ’80s, so they kept the $20,000 house and converted it into a rental property. It’s now 2024, and they are retired.
The $20,000 house is now worth $1.2 million. They want to sell the house and use the profits help fund their retirement. However, after speaking with their accountant, they learned that if they sold the house, they would owe around $700,000 in taxes, including both state and federal taxes. They are currently receiving about $3,500 in rent from the house, so they decided not to sell it and to keep it as a rental.
This story is more common than people think. Many boomers are sitting on significant real estate holdings but don’t want to sell due to the tax burden.
We should create a one-time tax holiday to allow these individuals to sell their properties without paying capital gains taxes. The tax holiday would work as follows:
Ruby and Python are two popular programming languages known for their simplicity, readability, and extensive libraries. Both languages offer package managers to handle dependencies and streamline project development. In the Ruby ecosystem, we have Bundler, while in Python, I have come to rely on Poetry. Let’s look at these two tools, exploring their features, usage, and benefits.
Bundler, the Ruby dependency manager, uses a Gemfile to define project dependencies and their versions. Bundler resolves the dependencies and installs the required gems (libraries) into the project.
Poetry, the Python dependency manager, employs a pyproject.toml file to define dependencies, versions, and other project metadata. Poetry resolves the dependencies and installs them into the virtual environment, which isolates the project from the system Python installation.
If you need to compare the contents of a large CSV file the to data in your existing database, you might want to take advantage of temporary tables. A temporary table exists only for the duration of the database session or transaction in which it is created. These tables can be useful for storing intermediate or temporary data that you need to compare to your live data but don’t want to persist in the database permanently.
Let’s look at an example:
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE temp_uploaded_orders (
order_id INT,
store_id TEXT,
settled BOOLEAN
);
We sometimes need to convert strings to dates to intervals and back to string in Postgres. One common set of queries I reach for is to convert “seconds” field into something that is readable by human. Most of us read times in the “hh::mm::ss” format and don’t like to do math in our head.
Here’s a simple query with to_char to convert seconds into this format:
SELECT TO_CHAR('95 second'::interval, 'HH24:MI:SS')
-- "00:01:35"
If you are lazy like me and thinking of branch names is mentally taxing, it is time for a tool. I’ve been using this small ruby script for over 3 years to generate branch names. The script looks like this:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# Usage: tobr "Add customer phone Number"
text = ARGV.first || ""
puts text.gsub(" ","_").downcase
New job! More later on that. They shipped me a company laptop and I wanted to go through and document the essensial tools that I used to get up and running for Ruby and Rails Development.
The all? method in Ruby returns a boolean value (true/false) if all the objects in the list either return true or satisfies the block condition.
No block:
>> [ true, "dog", "bear", 19 ].all?
=> true
>> [ nil, true, "hello" ].all?
=> false
With a block:
>> %w(cat dog squirrel bear).all? { |word| word.length >= 3 }
=> true
>> %w(cat dog squirrel bear).all? { |word| word.length <= 3 }
=> false
Enum.all? No block:
>> Enum.all?([ true, "dog", "bear", 19 ])
true
>> Enum.all?([ nil, true, "hello" ])
false
With a block/fn:
>> Enum.all?(["cat", "dog", "squirrel", "bear"], fn word -> String.length(word) >= 3 end)
=> true
>> Enum.all?(["cat", "dog", "squirrel", "bear"], fn word -> String.length(word) <= 3 end)
=> false
Only with callback support:
> [ true, "dog", "bear", 19 ].every(x => x)
true
> [null, true, "hello" ].every(x => x)
false
> ["cat", "dog", "squirrel", "bear"].every(word => word.length >= 3)
true
> ["cat", "dog", "squirrel", "bear"].every(word => word.length <= 3)
false