Daily Check-in: July 16, 2026

Set up dev environment, tested `pdfplumber` table extraction

Jul 17, 20261 min read

Progress: Set up the uv environment to test the PDF table extraction using pdfplumber (after trying pypdf and xberg). Used SWE 1.7 inside Devin Desktop IDE to build an end-to-end Python pipeline that extracts, normalizes, and loads table data into a DuckDB database.
Struggle: Extracted data quality is inconsistent. The San Diego reports have complex, handcrafted layouts with merged columns and multi-layered headers. Comparing two different report years revealed some format drift, the newer report contains more data and sometimes a completely different layout, making reliable parsing difficult and hard to trust, but not impossible to deal with.
1. 2026
2. 2007
Plan: Put together a 4-5 minute demo video and status update to showcase what was accomplished this week, outline the extraction challenges, and present potential next steps for the project.

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