You can learn more about Austin on LinkedIn and check out a blog he wrote on building the SDK for Open Telemetry here.

You can find Austin at the CNCF Slack community, in the OTel SIG channel, or the client-side SIG channels. The calendar is public on opentelemetry.io. Embrace has its own Slack community to talk all things Embrace or all things mobile observability. You can join that by going to embrace.io as well.

Congrats to Stack Overflow user Cottentail for earning an Illuminator badge, awarded when a user edits and answers 500 questions, both actions within 12 hours.

For the last two years, Postgres has been the most popular database among respondents to our Annual Developer Survey. 

Timescale is a startup working on an open-source PostgreSQEL stack for AI applications. You can follow the company on X and check out their work on GitHub. 

You can learn more about Avthar on his website and on LinkedIn. 

Congrats to Stack Overflow user Haymaker for earning a Great Question badge. They asked: 

How Can I Override the Default SQLConnection Timeout

? Nearly 250,000 other people have been curious about this same question.

Jannis Kallinikos is a coauthor of Data Rules: Reinventing the Market Economy (MIT Press, 2024) with Cristina Alaimo, which lays out a framework for a new social science focused on the socioeconomic changes driven by data. 

You can read an excerpt from Data Rules on our blog here.

Explore more of Dr. Kallinikos’s work.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Ebrahim Ghasemi for answering What is the structure of an application protocol data unit (APDU) command and response?

CodeWhisperer is an AI coding companion trained on Amazon and open-source code that gives you coding suggestions in real time. 

In addition to being general manager for CodeWhisperer, Doug is also the GM for Amazon CodeGuru Security, which uses machine learning to detect security policy violations and vulnerabilities. 

Connect with Doug on LinkedIn.

Asked and answered: user Manodnya B won a Lifeboat badge for answering Cannot find the Start Button under CodeWhisperer in AWS Toolkit.

Clockwise is a time orchestration platform that optimizes schedules to create more time in your day. Clockwise AI, their new GPT-powered scheduling assistant, is launching in beta. Join the waitlist here to get early access. (They’re also hiring!)

Ryan wrote a recent article about whether meetings are making developers less productive.

Cal Newport’s instant classic Deep Work is about learning to tune out distractions and focus on cognitively demanding tasks.

Speaking of classics, Paul Graham of Y Combinator wrote about maker’s vs. manager’s schedules back in 2009.

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.

Kudos to Stack Overflow user Joe Caruso, who won a Great Question badge with Get current time in hours and minutes.

California is trying to transform how math is taught. How’s that going?

Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that allows scientists to see how electrons move by mapping their positions in an atom. Learn more here and here.

As Ben says, speaking of things that are difficult to observe and don’t make a lot of sense, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is on trial for a historically huge amount of fraud. Follow the live trial blog from Wired or check out their explainer.

Starting next year, Unity is charging developer fees. We explore the back and forth as they try to find a solution that works for the company and the community.

Shoutout to user vasco, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering How to test abstract class in Java with JUnit?.

If you want to hear more of her work, check out Alexandra’s Instagram. 

She uses Tidal Cycles and Supercollider to make algorithms that get people to dance. 

Interested in algoraves? You may be able to find one near you or run your own. 

Check out Alexandra in her ad for Logitech, then check out her favorite keyboard

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Ben is watching AI Explained, a YouTube channel that covers the latest AI developments and their implications. 

Read Ryan’s article ​​Do large language models know what they are talking about?.

Is language really unique to humans? New research suggests maybe not.

Not for the first time, Ryan recommends the work of Noam Chomsky: Why Only Us: Language and Evolution, an evolutionary account of language acquisition in humans written with Robert C. Berwick.

OverflowAI search is now available for alpha testing. Learn more here.

Good news for your cable clutter: Apple is switching to USB-C charging ports. Here’s when.

The WGA (Writers Guild of America) strike ended with an agreement that “allows for artificial intelligence as a tool, not a replacement,” but the arguments about creativity, copyright, and AI are far from over.

If you’re interested in working with PHP, head over to the PHP Collective and check out conversations like Most useful new PHP features for version 8?.

pgnanalyze helps users deliver consistent PostgreSQL performance and availability at any scale. Get started with a free trial or explore their docs. You can also find them on YouTube, where Lukas posts a weekly show called 5mins of Postgres.

Lukas was a founding engineer of Citus Data. Citus is an open-source extension to PostgreSQL that was eventually acquired by Microsoft. Find them on GitHub.

If you’re new to the topic, SQL (Structured Query Language) is a language for querying databases, introduced in the 1970s. 

Find Lukas on LinkedIn, Twitter, or GitHub.

Check out Luyang’s work at his website or in this Youtube playlist. 

To make these animations, Luyang uses Processing, a 20-year-old language that started out as a visual way to teach programming but evolved into a professional development tool. 

Logitech selected Luyang as one of the ambassadors to show off what you can do with their MX Keys S Combo. 

Shout out to George Profenza for dropping a top answer on Position of a vector in coordinate system (Processing/p5.js).

If you missed the first part of our conversation with Chris, listen to it here.

Modular’s new programming language, Mojo, is built for AI developers. Check out their docs or find them on GitHub.

Connect with Chris on LinkedIn. 

Shoutout to user DanielGibbs, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering what is the difference between getType() and getClass() in java?.

Modular built a new programming language, Mojo, for AI developers. Explore their docs or find them on GitHub.

Chris is on LinkedIn. 

Congratulations to user Shengyuan Lu, whose answer to Priority queue ordering of elements merited a Lifeboat badge.

If you missed the first part of this conversation, listen to it here.

Replit is a browser-based IDE (integrated development environment). Check out their blog or start coding.

ICYMI: Stack Overflow recently implemented semantic search, allowing users to search using natural language.

Explore Stack Overflow Labs to learn more about OverflowAI and other projects.

Amjad Masad is on LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub.

Congratulations to Stack Overflow user macxpat, whose answer to How to install Linux packages in Replit earned a Lifeboat badge.

Chelsea Troy defines technical debt and maintenance load in her blog post, “Stop saying ‘technical debt.’”

Learn more about technical bankruptcy in this blog post, “Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off.”

Joel Spolsky’s classic blog post on avoiding rewriting code from scratch – Things you should never do, part I.

Technical debt as explained by Ward Cunningham, who coined the term.

Code as an asset, a conversation from Hacker News.

Middleware is the “software glue” that provides services to applications beyond those available from the operating system. 

Ratpack framework is a toolkit for creating high performance web applications.

React is a front end javascript library.

jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to simplify HTML.

Questions about functional programming.

User shout out! Nikoksr received the lifeboat badge after answering a question related to math.pow.

Replit is a browser-based IDE (integrated development environment). See what they’re up to on their blog or just start coding.

RIP Google Wave, one of the greats.

Find Amjad on LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, or via his website.

After founding two companies, including StrongDM, a dynamic management access platform (explore their docs here), Elizabeth took a “break” by co-authoring a book. 

Founder vs Investor: The Honest Truth About Venture Capital from Startup to IPO is about what she learned as a founder and executive about the founder-investor relationship. Order it on Bookshop or Amazon.

Elizabeth’s co-author is investor and advisor Jerry Neumann, managing director of Neu Venture Capital.

One option for your next weekend outing: a ride and tie.

Connect with Elizabeth on LinkedIn.

Connect with Jerry Neumann on LinkedIn.

Nice work: User Reap’s answer to Get String Name from Enum in C# earned them a Lifeboat badge.

Gašper’s work combines machine learning, statistical modeling, neuroimaging, and behavioral experiments “to better understand how neural networks learn internal representations in speech and how humans learn to speak.”

One thing that surprised him about generative adversarial networks (GANs)? How innovative they are, capable of generating English words they’ve never heard before based on words they have.

Read about how AI is restoring a stroke survivor’s ability to speak.

Universal grammar proposes a hypothetical structure in the brain responsible for humans’ innate language abilities. The concept is credited to the famous linguist Noam Chomsky; read his take on GenAI.

AI expert Yoshua Bengio recently signed an open letter asking AI labs to pause the training of AI systems powerful enough to pass the Turing test. Read about his reasoning.

Find the Berkeley Speech and Communication Network here.

Find Gašper on his website, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Or dive into his research.

Congratulations to Lifeboat badge winner and self-proclaimed data nerd John Rotenstein, who saved How can I delete files older than seven days in Amazon S3? from the ignominy of ignorance.

Zapier is a no-code automation platform that allows users to create custom workflows for their critical work apps. Learn how it works, peruse the blog, or sign up to try beta AI features.

Check out Reid’s article about how to write more effective AI prompts.

Zapier built a natural language actions (NLA) API to enable AI models to independently use natural language to complete Zapier actions.

You know the doge, but do you know the dog? RIP Balltze.

Find Reid on LinkedIn and the social network formerly known as Twitter.

Find Kyle on LinkedIn, GitHub, and text-based social media.

Stack Overflow’s Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) focus on aspects of employees’ personhood, “who you are outside of your role, who you bring to every single room that you enter,” Joey explains. Among our ERGs are Black and Brown, LGBTQ+, MIND (mental illness and neurodiversity), and a group for caregivers and parents. Interested in learning more about our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, plus more about what it’s like to work at Stack Overflow? Start here.

Members of Stack’s MIND ERG contributed invaluable perspective, insights, and feedback that helped us write our two-parter on ADHD and neurodiversity: Developer with ADHD? You’re not alone and What developers with ADHD want you to know.

Joey is on LinkedIn.

Natasha is also on LinkedIn.

Kyle is on Linked, GitHub, and text-based social media.

Stack Overflow user apostofes earned a Great Question badge for their query How do I get the value of a tensor in PyTorch?, which has helped 175,000 people and counting.

Rockset is a real-time search and analytics database. Explore their docs and developer tools here.

We here at Stack Overflow recently implemented our own vector search. Here’s a technical deep dive into how we did it. 

Louis is on LinkedIn.

Three cheers for Lifeboat badge winner user7610, who rescued C++ application terminates with 143 exit code. What does it mean? with a solid answer.

Sorcero uses a mix of natural language processing, generative AI, and even more old school symbolic AI, where they craft their own ontologies, to try and ingest that river of new medical data and make it easier to search and comprehend. 

Less than 0.2% of the global population can read a medical paper! AI can help make these dense works up to 700x more readable. 

Medical Affairs Teams are the groups inside big pharmaceutical companies that helps surface the right information to health providers. It’s hard for them to keep up with the thousands of new articles and research papers being published each month, much less unpack that information. 

Connect with Dipanwita Das and Hellmut Adolphs on LinkedIn. 

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner John Carrell for saving the question Self join vs. inner join with an excellent answer. 

Last month, we announced the launch of OverflowAI from the stage of WeAreDevelopers. To learn more about AI-driven products and features in the works, check out Stack Overflow Labs. 

Among the projects Alex works on is a semantic search API and the new search experience on Stack Overflow for Teams.

LLMs can be vulnerable to jailbreak attacks like the napalm grandma exploit.

Kyle is on GitHub, Linked, and text-based social media.

Michael is on LinkedIn.

Alex is on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Pushpendra, who scooped Error: Invalid postback or callback argument from a churning ocean of ignorance. 

SPONSORED BY DISCOVER FINANCIAL SERVICES

Go deeper into Technology at Discover. 

If your interested in working on an event-driven architecture that uses domain-driven design within a financial organization, check out jobs.discover.com.

Connect with Paul on LinkedIn.

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The mission of Night Shift Development is to democratize data analytics to help organizations and users of all skill levels understand their data. Their flagship product, ClearQuery, is a data intelligence and analytics platform designed for nontechnical users. 

ClearQuery has a free version that lets you try out the full array of features. Learn how it works and register here to get started, gratis.

Learn how Stack Overflow implemented semantic search to allow users to search using natural language.

Read about why self-healing code is the future of software development.

Tim is on LinkedIn. 

Thanks and congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Boann, whose answer to Sort four numbers without an array has been viewed 23,000 times and counting.

You can connect with Lenny Primak at Flow Logix, X, LinkedIn, Github, or Mastodon. 

Got questions about Java? Check out the site.

Apache Groovy is a Java programming language. 

Virtual Threads reduce the effort put into writing and maintaining code as well as observing high-throughput concurrent applications.

Apache Shiro is an open-source security framework that can do authentication, authorization, cryptography, and session management. 

Jakarta EE, or Jakarta Enterprise Edition, is a suite of services that helps developers write enterprise applications for the Java platform. 

Vlad is Head of Research and Development at Siemens Healthineers, the healthcare arm of tech conglomerate Siemens. He wrote about SRE on our blog here.

His book, Establishing SRE Foundations: A Step-by-Step Guide to Introducing Site Reliability Engineering in Software Delivery Organizations, is available now. 

Site reliability engineering (SRE) applies a software engineering approach to IT operations and infrastructure, with the goal of building scalable, reliable systems capable of handling constant updates from dev teams. SRE is closely related to DevOps.

ICYMI, we talked with Chef cofounder Adam Jacob about how he’s creating a new-and-improved approach to infrastructure automation. Listen to that conversation here.

Connect with Vlad on LinkedIn, where you can also read snippets of his book on SRE.

Lifeboat badge winner Abbas Galiyakotwala’s answer to How do I split a comma-separated string? filled a void of ignorance with a little extra knowledge.

Twilio is a customer engagement platform whose communication APIs for voice, text, chat, email, and video are used by millions of developers. See what’s happening on their blog, dig into their docs, or check out their Stack Overflow Collective.

This summer, Twilio announced CustomerAI, which applies the power of LLMs to the rich troves of customer data that flows through Twilio’s platform. Learn more here.

ICYMI: From the stage of WeAreDevelopers, Stack Overflow announced a roadmap for integrating GenAI into our public platform and paid offerings. Check out Stack Overflow Labs to see what we’re working on.

Also ICYMI: Listen to our conversation with Jody about his path from physics to sales to programming and what drew him to working at Stack Overflow.

Register for SIGNAL 2023, Twilio’s customer and developer conference, happening virtually and for free on August 23, 2023. Attendees can expect a deep dive into AI and how it’s revolutionizing customer experience technology.

Connect with Kathryn on LinkedIn or the social network formerly known as Twitter.

Connect with Jody on LinkedIn. 

Three cheers for Lifeboat badge winner blackgreen, who swooped in to save How can I write a generic function that accepts any numerical type? from the howling void of ignorance.

Find out why others have joined Shell. 

If you want to experience being a developer at one of the world’s largest energy companies, they’re hiring.

Amber Webb is on LinkedIn.

Naresh Kumar is on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Tomasz Kula, today’s Lifeboat badge winner, for dropping some knowledge on Multiple components binding with the same reactive form control update issue and saving it from ruin. 

Sean hosts Partially Redacted, a podcast about data privacy, security, and compliance.

He also hosts the podcast Software Engineering Daily, which features technical interviews on everything from the ethics of GPTs to cloud-native search and WebAssembly. Start with the recent episode Surviving ChatGPT with Christian Hubicki (of Survivor fame).

You can also read about how he crowdsourced a behavioral model for Survivor.

Sean spent four years working in developer relations (DevRel) at Google. Here’s a Software Engineering Daily episode about the role DevRel plays at Google.

Connect with Sean on LinkedIn or Twitter (I mean, X), or check out his website.

Kudos to Great Question badge winner Kai Sellgren for asking How to remove an element from a vector given the element?.

You can learn more about OverflowAI and sign up to be an alpha tester here.

You can check out Ellen and Jody on Linkedin. 

Congrats to Ben Lindsay, who was awarded a Lifeboat badge for his answer to: How can I divide each element in a tuple by a single integer?

Pablo is a Python core developer, Steering Council member, and release manager of Python 3.10 and 3.11. He’s currently a senior software engineer at Bloomberg.

Looking for a comprehensive guide to contributing to Python? The Python Developer’s Guide is the place to start.

The Zen of Python is a list of the language’s guiding principles, including, “There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.”

Find Pablo on LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub.

Find Kyle, a senior software engineer on Stack Overflow’s public platform, on Linked, Twitter, and GitHub.

Pablo is a Python core developer, Steering Council member, and release manager of Python 3.10 and 3.11. He splits this work 50/50 with his day job as a senior software engineer at Bloomberg.

An astrophysicist by training, he did his PhD on rotating black holes.

Whether you’re a new contributor or a seasoned veteran, the Python Developer’s Guide is a comprehensive guide to contributing to Python.

Pablo is on LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub.

Kyle is also on Linked, Twitter, and GitHub.

Shoutout to Inquisitive Badge winner trever for asking well-received questions on 30 separate days.

DoIT’s sales pitch is simple: they provide technology and expertise to clients who want to use the cloud, free of charge, with the big cloud providers paying the bills.

You can check out Sascha’s writing on machine learning on his Medium blog.  

Connect with him on LinkedIn or subscribe to his YouTube channel

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Cat’s research centers on the socio-cognitive factors and processes that help people learn and succeed. In her role as director of Pluralsight Flow’s Developer Success Lab, she studies what makes software teams thrive and shares that research with the community so teams can learn from her findings.

In a recent report, the Dev Success Lab explored how visibility can encourage higher-performing teams and better business outcomes.

Pluralsight is an education platform for software developers. Pluralsight Flow, their software delivery intelligence platform, is designed to eliminate developer friction and wasted time.

Cat is on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is Kent Kostelac, who gave a terrific answer to One-line if-else in C#.

LlamaIndex is a data framework for building LLM applications. Check out the open-source framework or get started with the developer community, LlamaHub.

Looking for a deeper understanding of RAG? Start with our guide.

Wondering how to import `SimpleDirectoryReader` from LlamaIndex? This question has you covered.

Jerry Chen is a partner at Greylock. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

Read Jerry Liu’s posts on the LlamaIndex blog or connect with him on LinkedIn.

ICYMI, listen to our episode with Agile pioneer Jim Highsmith: The meeting that changed how we build software (Ep. 579).

Explore Connell’s website or his talks.

Connell will be speaking at DDD East Midlands again this year: October 7, 2023 (with apologies to our British listeners for the date format). 

He’s also on GitHub, Twitter, and Stack Overflow (naturally).

Thanks to Connell for answering his own question: Why does this SelectMany perform several SQL queries instead of a single join?.

Netlify’s all-in-one development platform gives devs access to build, deploy, and backend services for websites and web apps. Get started with their docs.

Jamstack is a web development architecture based on JavaScript, APIs, and Markup (the JAM in Jamstack). Learn what Jamstack is and what benefits it offers.

Composable architecture has been called “the next big thing” in web development. Netlify defines it as “a development approach [that] provides the ability to more rapidly build technology stacks by making use of logically separated reusable and customizable components.”

Dana is on LinkedIn.

Warm congrats to Lifeboat badge winner hasectic saif, who rescued the question How can I print to standard error in C with 'printf'? from an answerless void.

VerseProp is a digital real estate platform where users can buy, sell, and rent virtual properties.

New to the concept of digital real estate? The Motley Fool has a useful primer for you.

If you need to brush up on your investment terms, a supercycle is “a sustained period of expansion, usually driven by robust growth in demand for products and services.”

Joel is on LinkedIn.

Will is on LinkedIn.

Follow VerseProp on Twitter, where the team welcomes questions.

Today’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to Omar, for helping 44,000 people and counting with their answer to Event handlers on Message box buttons.

Our 2023 Developer Survey explored AI’s benefits for developers. Read about the results here.

For more WWDC talk, listen to our episode from last month: Chatting with Apple at WWDC: Macros in Swift and the new visionOS (Ep. 578).

Squarespace is acquiring Google Domains.

Congratulations to Bruno Brant, who won a Lifeboat badge for answering Where can I view LINQ source code?.

While he’s been the dean of the School of Computer Science since 2019, Martial started his career at Carnegie Mellon University way back in 1984. 

Ben covered LIDAR inventor Velodyne while at the Verge, while Martial has LIDAR’s ancestor, the laser rangefinder, which was state of the art in 1986. 

Martial’s area of research is in computer vision and perception for autonomous systems. Since 1985, he’s been a part of 388 publications. 

Congrats to Lifeboat winner mx0 for their answer to the question “How to use a reserved keyword in pydantic model?”

Software might not be top of mind when you think of an energy company like Shell, but software engineering powers a lot of what they do. The tech stack includes React, Golang, Python, GraphQL, MongoDB, Kafka, and the list goes on. The experience their developers have at work is a priority for the organization and its leaders. 

Episode notes:

Find out why others have joined Shell. 

If you want to experience what being a developer at one of the world’s largest energy companies looks like, they’re hiring.

You can connect with Abhai on LinkedIn. 

Congrats to this episode’s lifeboat badge winner, CertainPerformance, for their answer to 

Convert different strings to snake_case in JavaScript

. You saved the question and got some shinies for your profile. 

Adam is the cofounder and former CTO of Chef, which provides DevOps automation tools that help configure, deploy, and manage application infrastructure, including security and compliance.

Adam’s new venture, System Initiative, reimagines infrastructure-as-code as collaborative, open-source software. See what they’re up to on their blog, starting with Adam’s article DevOps without papercuts.

If you’re interested in playing with a developer build of System Initiative, submit your information here. You can also join System Initiative on Discord (and keep an eye on their open positions).

Connect with Adam on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Sofy is a no-code test automation platform for mobile apps. SofySense is their OpenAI-powered AI assistant. See what they’re up to on their blog or check out their open roles.

One of the biggest challenges in testing is deciding whether to use mock or live data. 

Interested in reading about how Stack Overflow is building up our test coverage?

Syed is on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Todd A. Jacobs for interceding between the question How can I check whether a string is an integer in Ruby? and the relentless march of time.

CodiumAI plugs into your IDE and suggests meaningful test suites as you code. See what they’re up to on their blog or scope out their open roles. You can also follow them on Twitter.

Connect with Kyle on Linked, Twitter, or GitHub.

Connect with Itamar on LinkedIn.

Today’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to Héctor M. for answering Convert a string to a Boolean in C#. Thanks for spreading some knowledge.

Interested in trying Duet? You can get on the waitlist here.

You can learn more about tuning and deploying your own version of Google’s foundation models in their Generative AI studio.

If tuning your own model sounds overwhelming, you can head to Model Garden, where a wide selection of open-source and third-party models are available to try.

Marcos is on LinkedIn.

Learn more about Staging Ground on our blog or in the help center.

Find Kyle on LinkedIn, GitHub, and Twitter.

Spevacus is a full stack developer and Stack Overflow moderator. They’re a participant in Charcoal, a user-run group that fights spam and rude/abusive content across the Stack Exchange network.

Jim is a pioneering software developer who was one of 17 original signatories to the Agile Manifesto. 

His first engineering job was on a little NASA program you may have heard of: Project Apollo.

His latest book is Wild West to Agile: Adventures in software development evolution and revolution; get your copy here.

Find Jim on LinkedIn or his website.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is nCod3d for answering How can I find how many useful digits are in any given a number N?. Thanks for spreading some knowledge.

Our guests today are Christopher Thielen, product manager for languages and frameworks at Apple, and Josh Shaffer, a Senior Director of Software at Apple with a focus on Swift frameworks. 

We discuss the introduction of Swift Macros, improving widgets with App Intents, and some of the new paradigms for crafting apps in visionOS.

If you want to get the full picture of all the updates Apple announced for software developers, you can watch this year’s State of the Union or dive into particulars with 175 different videos focused on key elements of the announcements.

MosaicML is a platform for training and deploying large AI models at scale. Explore their docs, check out their blog, and keep an eye on their open roles.

Jonathan Frankle is the Chief Scientist at MosaicML and an incoming Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard.

Abhinav Venigalla is the NLP Architect at MosaicML.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is singmotor for rescuing How to remove columns with too many missing values in Python from the dustbin of history.