My little corner of the internet. I'm a software engineer on a quantitative team; here I keep short notes on code, communication, and whatever else I'm thinking about.
My film & travel photographs, organized by place, live at conorlivingston.com.
Writing
Effective, Direct Communication Cheatsheet
Swap tentative phrases for direct, confident ones — a quick reference table.
Why I'm Learning to Say No (Even to Cool Stuff)
GenAI lets me do the work of five people — which makes saying no to the interesting-but-unimportant more important than ever.
Thoughts on Hackerrank's Big Sorting Problem
Why Python's int is too slow for 988k-digit numbers, and how Decimal solves the Big Sorting problem.
Alembic Migrations: How Execute Raw SQL On New Tables
A newly created table isn't visible to a separate psycopg2 connection mid-migration — bind to the Alembic session instead.
Gotchas of Opening CSV in Excel
When Excel mangles CSV numbers into scientific notation or truncates decimals — and the one-character fix.
Python Arrays: Extend vs Append
append nests, extend flattens, and Python 3.5's unpacking operator gives you a third option.
How-To Run a Specific Test Only from a PyTest Suite
Mark a test with @pytest.mark and run just it with pytest -m.