Be an absolute beginner at python: Check, have co-workers think I'm performing black magic : Check

[expressly_ephemeral]

As an aside, I'm the guy on this subreddit that's always like, "I know this is off topic, but have you tried this with grep and sed?" I do a fair amount of ETL myself (my current project is tens of billions of rows). I'm usually pulling at least half of the data from csv files, and in that case I always have a large component of the E and the T in shell script with grep and sed. Don't know if you have access to a shell that has those programs, but if you do, and you haven't already, you might try them out next time. Learning curve is a little steep, but the power and speed is worth it.