436 karma · joined September 8, 2016
Great to here you praise auth. I almost forgot getting auth ‘right’ inside Excel was a real time burglar.
Agreed with the friction around getting started. I would like to see it reduced. It’s cool to see you using them to wrap Python functions - I have done something similar before myself, and still need to get around to shimming Haskell into excel at some point.
Another thing I don’t like is how JavaScript Custom Function cell formulas have a horrible string after the _xldudf marker, which becomes noticeable if your workbook doesn’t/can’t load the custom functions addin (or you unload the addin)
Thanks for your comment
7+ years ago I had the option of leaving the Excel team. My then boss’s boss knew I had an interest in bringing Python to Excel and offered me a chance to tackle it if I chose to stay. What was meant to be a 6 month project turned into a ~3 year project, the Python part faded away and we ended up enabling JavaScript Custom Functions in Excel instead.
For Python we were also running ‘in the cloud’ (AzureML v1), although there was some back-and-forth on if we should run locally. I think what made the Python part disappear was our partner AzureML team re-orged, re-released, re-hired, we lost a PM and our work caught the attention of another partner team who realised they could use our code to execute their JavaScript out-of-process. And so I spent a lot of time ensuring that feature was successfully shipped at, I guess, the detriment of Python.
I had a lot of help from some strong engineers and learnt a lot. The core of the work was modifying the calculation engine of Excel to allow functions to compute asynchronously, allowing the user to continue working on other parts of their spreadsheet while the remote endpoint (be it JavaScript, Python or something else) was computing. Previously the spreadsheet would lock up while calculations were running, and that wouldn’t be cool for long-running unbounded calculations. Have to wonder if any of the stuff we built made it into this new feature.
Super great to see this and look forward to trying it out.
Recalc or die
I'm building a house in Bangkok and up in Chiang Mai of all places (see the company is from there) and was thinking of adding some air quality sensors there so will definitely check airgradient's out.
If I may ask Achim, do you manufacture in Thailand? What kind of scale you at? No promises, but I have access to some decent sized factories and given your mission, there might be something we can help with.
Also dorling kindersly’s eyewitness soundtrack deserves a special mention.
Didn’t become a robotics engineer.
Thanks for sharing :)
Recalc or die
Anyway, if the administration changes to the democrats, in your opinion, do you feel wait times will decrease and will this be get fairly rapidly.
Further, can one be tactical and move to another state to naturalize and hopefully we processed by a state office with a lesser backlog?