Literature & Blog

Thoughts on data engineering, hardware hacking, and software development.

2026-06-12
by Andri Ólafsson

Why I Started Versioning Data Like Software: The pip install for Healthcare Pipelines

How we stopped treating data like a passive file and started treating it like an active software dependency to protect hundreds of medical research papers.

Data EngineeringPythonData as CodeSemantic VersioningMedallion Architecture
2026-06-05
by Andri Ólafsson

The API That Lied: Untangling the Chaos of Government Healthcare Data

A look back at a chaotic journey to domesticate a wild government healthcare data pipeline using Pydantic, dynamic quality scaffolding, and Medallion Architecture.

Data EngineeringPydanticPandasMedallion ArchitectureHealthcarePytest
2026-04-06
by Andri Ólafsson

Dialing the Past, Resurrecting an Old 1940s Telephone

A multi-year journey in mechatronics: rebuilding a 1940s Western Electric telephone so it rings and plays family history, using a 2011 Raspberry Pi, an AG1171 module, and immeasurable patience.

IoTPythonRaspberry PiHardware TinkeringLinuxMechatronics
2026-01-02
by Andri Ólafsson

The importance of visualizing data

A deep dive into Anscombe’s Quartet and a plea for the "misfit" data points. Why summary statistics are just a shadow of the truth.

Data ScienceStatisticsVisualizationAnscombes QuartetPython
2025-11-24
by Andri Ólafsson

The Taming of the CSV: A Guide to Robust Data Ingestion

A survival guide for ingesting messy data, handling encoding nightmares, and building pipelines that scream when things go wrong.

Data EngineeringPythonPandasBest PracticesETL
2025-11-24
by Andri Ólafsson

Seeing in Curves: A Practical Guide to ROC, TPR, FPR, and the Four Outcomes of Classification

A clear, intuitive walkthrough of ROC curves, true/false positives and negatives, and how to understand model performance beyond accuracy.

Machine LearningModel EvaluationData ScienceClassificationMetrics