I came across a wonderful open source project recently — Project OSRM (link) — A modern C++ routing engine for shortest paths in road networks. You can imagine it as a free version of Google Maps API, without live traffic of course. It is very valuable for my work because my current company has large shipping and logistic services. Being able to calculate the distance and directions between locations in a timely fashion will enable us to research and modeling on route optimization, leads generation, etc.
Today I am so pleased to introduce my first PyPI package (so much easier to submit comparing to CRAN) — gower for calculating gower distance. The core function is originally published by Marcelo Beckmann. There are lots of packages in R that incorporated this method but unfortunately not for Python users. I took this chance to try the whole package-making experience for PyPI and here we go!
What is gower distance?
Intuition I was working with an Elasticsearch project on AWS using Python and the requests_aws4auth package worked like a charm for me. Never had any issue regarding the authentication (AWS V4 could be hard to work with sometimes). However, when I trying to create a Shiny app for my project, the problem emerged. I just couldn’t get the V4 auth to work with httr in R. I tried aws.signature package on Github but keep getting request header issues.