This is the companion page for my PyOhio 2026 talk. Everything I demoed is here to take home: the slides, the notebooks, and the dataset. LIKE is the tool most of us reach for first when we search free text. You end up chaining OR and NOT LIKE clauses to patch each miss, and you are still reading every record by hand. The talk works through what to reach for instead, using 448 free-text notes from a fictional dog spa. ...
I always learn something at the PyTexas training day. This year, I learned how little I actually know about Python imports. Heather Crawford ran the morning session on sys.path, modules, and packages. I have been writing Python long enough to fix ImportError messages without understanding them. The mental model she gave us helped me make sense of it. Find, then bind. Everything flows from those two steps. I had to redo my imports multiple times during the lab exercises. I still need my notes to walk someone through the whole picture, but I have a map now where I had guesses before. ...