Updates

1/24/23 Ran into this library cloudpickle and it reminded me of this post.

3/18/21: Found this outrun which seems to be basically a better and more thought out way to do a lot of this.

Introduction

Recently I became interested in better workflows for machine learning projects. One of the main issues I’ve experienced is developing locally but not being able to easily test locally. Generally this is from a local computer being a bit slower and older for the types of models and datasets I am working with and initial code decisions that resulted in poor performance on a slower computer than the server used to train. Another instance I have had this happen is if the remote server is behind a VPN and a relay hop and there is a bit of a latency between saving the file and running it if I am using something such as VSCode (although you can try something such as a ProxyJump in your ssh config). Regardless of the problem, I have yet to find an actual workflow that I find versatile and simple.

Often it can be a hassle to get files from kaggle to a remote server.
Previously I had used cookies from chrome to allow me to download files or a python command line module that allowed me to specify the competition, neither of these work efficiently and are clunky/prone to breaking. I had been meaning to write a script to do this for some time now had never gotten around to it. Finally I did it and here it is posted, this is also incredibly useful for downloading files that are locked away by login/password on some site. For this, I am using RoboBrowser.