Death by a Thousand Python Pandas and Webhooks
A field report from the front lines of late-career entrepreneurship
There is an old Chinese phrase, lingchi — “death by a thousand cuts.” It describes a slow, public slicing meant to extract maximum suffering from minimum efficiency. Wikipedia, ever helpful, tells us the metaphor now applies to “a process where minor, incremental problems accumulate over time, resulting in significant failure, destruction, or collapse, rather than one swift blow.”
I bring this up because I am, apparently, being slowly executed by Python pandas and webhooks.
I do not know what I did to deserve this. Possibly it was the heinous offence of publishing fact-based financial commentary as an octogenarian — something your friendly young banker either cannot or will not do. Whatever the charge, the sentence has been handed down, and the instruments of torture are not knives but data feeds.
A brief defence of the accused
Let the record show I am in reasonable shape for a man who has been writing daily market commentary since 2004. Six feet, two hundred pounds, blood pressure a tidy 120 over 80. Celiac, so the diet is pristine by necessity rather than virtue. An hour of walking a day, 120,000 to 150,000 steps a month. The body is, frankly, holding up its end of the bargain.
The mind has signed up for something more ambitious. To compete as an entrepreneur in 2026, I have learned to use technology that one or two years ago I did not know existed. My daily power naps appear to function as a kind of cryosleep, allowing me to wake refreshed and confront the next round of acronyms.
This was not the world I trained for. My world had punch cards and mag tape at the office, Blockbuster and VHS at home. Webhooks, in that world, would have been a piece of fishing tackle.
The current grievance
For several days now, the source data feeding my portfolio publications has been quietly wrong. Not catastrophically wrong — just wrong enough to be useless, which in the financial business is the same thing. The issue is “push technology.” The data the vendor pushes is not arriving as advertised in the software the vendor sold me to receive it. There is a satisfying circularity to this that I would admire more if it were happening to someone else.
I have been told to hang in there. They are working on it. They will solve it in time.
That word. Time.
At eighty-three, my exchange rate with twenty- and thirty-somethings on the question of time is not favorable. Two days to them is roughly a month to me. I do not say this to complain — well, I do, but only a little — I say it because it is the one structural disadvantage I cannot engineer my way around. Everything else I can learn. Time, I cannot manufacture.
What I am not going to do
I am not going to quit. Anyone who has read me for any length of time knows the deal: my word is my bond, the reports get published, and they get published on schedule. If the data feed misbehaves, I will reconstruct what I need by hand, the old way, with the tools I trust. The portfolios will be updated. The subscribers will be served. The work will go out.
I am also not going to pretend the frustration is anything other than what it is. There is a certain dark comedy to spending an evening troubleshooting a webhook when one’s actual qualifications include fifty years of global markets, a fiduciary license, and several books — none of which mention webhooks. If this is masochism, it is at least an interesting variety of it. Perhaps a whole new branch of investor psychology to explore, somewhere between Kahneman and tech support.
The light at the end
Alexei tells me he is close. The new website and publishing system are nearly done, and when they arrive the result will be, in his word, impressive. No more thousand cuts. A clean, single-source operation under our own roof, on our own terms.
I believe him. He has earned that.
Until then: wine and cheese are waiting, the markets will be there in the morning, and I will get tomorrow’s reports out one way or another. The day the work stops being worth this kind of nonsense is the day I will let you know. We are nowhere near that day.
Good night. Sleep tight.
— Bill