⬅️ SXSW 2025: Senior Moments 🧭 Increasingly Connected ➡️

Finding My Niche

by Jay Cuthrell
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This week we take a look at newsletter specialization ideation as a JupyterLab exercise.

Getting Informed

If feedback is a gift, then reader feedback is a gift that keeps on giving. This week, I received feedback on the newsletter.

You are all over the place. Instead of the map of Jay’s mind, why not pick a niche topic and go very very deep?

This reader feedback got me thinking. What niche topic would be one I could go very deep on and keep up my regular pace of updates in a newsletter?

Where do I start?

Could my prior writing have a theme that isn’t obvious to me? What are the patterns buried within my ramblings?

I have posts in markdown format but my tagging has been lagging. If only there was a way to perform analysis on all my posts…

Oh, that’s right. I can open JupyterLab and scratch this itch in a few minutes.

➜  ~ git:(main) ✗ /opt/homebrew/opt/jupyterlab/bin/jupyter-lab

open JupyterLab

Topics.ipnyb

Side note: If you want to try this yourself, I’m adding to my buttondown-python-scripts in the JupyterLab folder.

https://github.com/JayCuthrell/buttondown-python-scripts

Goals

The script needs to be simple enough for me to grasp it. I used Google Gemini to help me make better mistakes. 🤣

  • Analyze markdown files (.md) by extracting the text, cleaning it up, and identifying the most and least common words, two-word phrases (bigrams), and three-word phrases (trigrams) to help understand the key topics and language patterns.
  • Use mature and documented libraries such as glob, markdown, re, nltk, collections.Counter, nltk.tokenize, nltk.corpus, nltk.util, and bs4 for the required language resources (tokenizers, stop words, formatting, etc.).
  • For each file, convert markdown to plain text then use BeautifulSoup to strip out HTML code, remove punctuation, convert everything to lowercase, and tokenize.
  • Apply filters as lists to keep only the words that are not in the filter list (i.e. things like numbers and weasel words).
  • Gather word frequencies and show the top results such as the 5 least common, 25 most common trigrams, 25 most common words, and 25 most common bigrams, along with their counts.

Setup the environment

pip install --upgrade pip
pip install pandas
pip install requests
pip install markdown
pip install textblob
pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install nltk
pip install gensim
pip install spacy

Customizing as I go on each run

  • Run the script and update filters by appending to weasel_words
  • Update the other filters to get rid of non-topical words like time references
  • Alter the numerical values for returned results
import glob
import markdown
import re
import nltk
from collections import Counter
from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
from nltk.util import ngrams
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# Download NLTK data if needed
nltk.download('punkt')  # For tokenization
nltk.download('stopwords')  # For stop word removal
nltk.download('averaged_perceptron_tagger')

# 1. Define Folder Path and Load Markdown Files
folder_path = '/path/to/my/blog/posts/*.md'  # Your folder path
markdown_files = glob.glob(folder_path)
all_text = ""

for file_path in markdown_files:
    with open(file_path, 'r') as file:
        md_text = file.read()
        plain_text = markdown.markdown(md_text)

        # Remove HTML tags
        soup = BeautifulSoup(plain_text, 'html.parser')
        plain_text = soup.get_text()

        all_text += plain_text + " " 

# 2. Clean and Preprocess Text
all_text = re.sub(r'[^\w\s]', '', all_text).lower() 
words = word_tokenize(all_text)

# Extended list of words to filter out

weasel_words = {"subscribe", "linkedin", "people", "good", "email",
                "shot"} # Add your words

days_of_week = {"timeline", "monday", "tuesday", "wednesday", "thursday", "friday", "saturday", "sunday"}
months = {"january", "february", "march", "april", "may", "june", "july", "august", "september",
          "october", "november", "december", "jan", "feb", "mar", "apr", "may", "jun", "jul",
          "aug", "sep", "oct", "nov", "dec"}  # Added abbreviations
week_variations = {"week", "weeks", "weekly"}

words_to_filter = set(stopwords.words('english'))
words_to_filter.update(weasel_words, days_of_week, months, week_variations) 

# Filter out words that are numbers
filtered_words = [word for word in words if not word in words_to_filter and not word.isdigit()]

# 3. Analyze for Most Common Words, Bigrams, and Trigrams
word_counts = Counter(filtered_words)
top_words = word_counts.most_common(25)

bigrams = ngrams(filtered_words, 2)
bigram_counts = Counter(bigrams)
top_bigrams = bigram_counts.most_common(25)

trigrams = ngrams(filtered_words, 3)
trigram_counts = Counter(trigrams)
top_trigrams = trigram_counts.most_common(25)

# Get the 5 least common trigrams
least_common_trigrams = trigram_counts.most_common()[-5:] 
# Note:  We reverse the order using `[-5:]` to get the least common ones.

print("\nTop 5 Least Common Three-Word Phrases:")
for trigram, count in least_common_trigrams:
    print(f"{trigram}: {count}")  

print("\nTop 25 Most Common Three-Word Phrases:")
for trigram, count in top_trigrams:
    print(f"{trigram}: {count}")

print("\nTop 25 Most Common Words:")
for word, count in top_words:
    print(f"{word}: {count}")

print("\nTop 25 Most Common Two-Word Phrases:")
for bigram, count in top_bigrams:
    print(f"{bigram}: {count}")

And the results…

Top 5 Least Common Three-Word Phrases:
(‘fighting’, ‘check’, ‘innovation’): 1
(‘check’, ‘innovation’, ‘customer’): 1
(‘innovation’, ‘customer’, ‘rfid’): 1
(‘customer’, ‘rfid’, ‘suppliers’): 1
(‘rfid’, ‘suppliers’, ‘sector’): 1

Top 25 Most Common Three-Word Phrases:
(‘edge’, ‘core’, ‘cloud’): 26
(‘hyperscale’, ‘cloud’, ‘providers’): 25
(‘internal’, ‘developer’, ‘platform’): 22
(‘low’, ‘code’, ‘code’): 17
(‘cloud’, ‘data’, ‘services’): 15
(‘developer’, ‘platform’, ‘idp’): 12
(‘business’, ‘value’, ‘engineering’): 11
(‘gartner’, ‘hype’, ‘cycle’): 11
(‘developer’, ‘experience’, ‘devx’): 11
(‘software’, ‘supply’, ‘chain’): 11
(‘site’, ‘reliability’, ‘engineering’): 10
(‘cloud’, ‘status’, ‘dashboards’): 10
(‘status’, ‘dashboards’, ‘cloud’): 10
(‘oracle’, ‘cloud’, ‘infrastructure’): 10
(‘silo’, ‘spreadsheet’, ‘sprawl’): 10
(‘supply’, ‘chain’, ‘security’): 10
(‘aws’, ‘azure’, ‘gcp’): 9
(‘google’, ‘cloud’, ‘platform’): 9
(‘multicloud’, ‘data’, ‘services’): 9
(‘cloud’, ‘engineering’, ‘slo’): 8
(‘oran’, ‘vran’, ‘5g’): 8
(‘cloud’, ‘impact’, ‘mapping’): 8
(‘cloud’, ‘mean’, ‘rca’): 8
(‘hyperscale’, ‘cloud’, ‘provider’): 8
(‘hype’, ‘cycle’, ‘emerging’): 8

Top 25 Most Common Words:
cloud: 562
data: 502
ai: 376
platform: 231
google: 229
technology: 212
engineering: 210
software: 208
services: 207
experience: 166
internet: 158
developer: 150
access: 148
business: 139
code: 138
market: 135
computing: 135
company: 132
network: 131
security: 130
product: 130
tools: 123
looking: 123
tech: 123
technologies: 122

Top 25 Most Common Two-Word Phrases:
(‘platform’, ‘engineering’): 83
(‘quantum’, ‘computing’): 48
(‘cloud’, ‘providers’): 43
(‘machine’, ‘learning’): 41
(‘zero’, ‘trust’): 40
(‘low’, ‘code’): 37
(‘developer’, ‘experience’): 36
(‘data’, ‘centers’): 36
(‘hyperscale’, ‘cloud’): 34
(‘cloud’, ‘provider’): 31
(‘google’, ‘cloud’): 31
(‘internal’, ‘developer’): 30
(‘generative’, ‘ai’): 29
(‘data’, ‘services’): 28
(‘edge’, ‘core’): 28
(‘supply’, ‘chain’): 27
(‘core’, ‘cloud’): 26
(‘impact’, ‘mapping’): 26
(‘status’, ‘dashboards’): 25
(‘ai’, ‘ml’): 24
(‘mean’, ‘rca’): 24
(‘mergers’, ‘acquisitions’): 24
(‘artificial’, ‘intelligence’): 22
(‘oracle’, ‘cloud’): 22
(‘developer’, ‘platform’): 22

Have I found my niche?

Based on these swirling telecom, cloud, and A.I. themes, I’m leaning towards a newsletter niche that provides a consistent format tracking where the edge and machine learning meet. More to come, but that’s my thinking as of this edition.

Stay tuned…

Disclosure

I am linking to my disclosure.

Topics:

ai audience cloud edge jupyterlab ml newsletter niche python specialization telecom

✍️ 🤓 Edit on Github 🐙 ✍️

⬅️ Previously: SXSW 2025: Senior Moments

➡️ Next: Increasingly Connected

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