,

The Path To Senior Engineer

Want to know how to grow to the Senior Engineering position? Take a look.

Read more
,

Don’t Be So Smart

Most Software Engineers think of themselves as too smart. They think they are the best and brightest coder alive or that has ever lived. Doing so, they stunt themselves from becoming Senior Engineers and become hard to work with, the nightmare of the PR process. You don’t need to be the smartest person in the […]

Read more

Data Modeling Is Easy

When you’ve been data modeling as long as I have, it gets to be the same old … same old. People make data modeling harder than it has to be. There is a lot of jargon that gets thrown around … third-normal-form, OLAP, OLTP … I give you the 3-4 basics that are at the […]

Read more
, ,

Is Devin Going To Take My Software Engineering Job?

Unless you’ve been hiding a rock you’ve probably heard the hubbub over Devin the new AI Software Engineer that is going to take your job. While this is a genius piece of marketing … it’s a bunch of crud. Never fear, you are in no more danger of losing your job in Software than when […]

Read more
, , ,

DuckDB has MAJOR Problems! OOM Errors.

I recently did a challenge. The results were clear. DuckDB CANNOT handle larger-than-memory datasets. OOM Errors.  See link below for more details. … DuckDB vs Polars – Thunderdome. 16GB on 4GB machine Challenge.   

Read more
,

Never Put Databricks Notebooks in Production

Recently an Architecture at Databricks recommended people use Notebooks for Production workloads. Very bad and horrible idea. Very expensive compute for most people (All Purpose Clusters) and it leads to horrible development practices. It set off a firestorm on Linkedin when I commented people SHOULD NOT follow this advice. Read here and here    

Read more
, ,

The Best Piece of Software Engineering Advice

You probably think this is another internet clickbait title uh? Just trying to get you to clickty clickty and sell you some Google Ads. Two problems. I don’t have Google Ads, and I know a small percentage of people will actually listen to this advice. Whatever. There is a reason some developers struggle to move […]

Read more
, ,

Why I Love Rust, but Deploy Python

I’m not sure if others have this same problem, maybe they are lucky, they get to build in their favorite language 24/7, it’s their tool of choice. I feel like I have a great burden to bear, a heavy one. I love to write Rust … but I deploy Python. Even when I know I […]

Read more
,

New SQL Practice Problems

New SQL Practice Problems I’m trying something new. I get a lot of questions from folks about getting into the Data Engineering space, how to get better, grow, learn, etc. So I came up with a solution. SQL Practice Problems.

Read more
, ,

The Abstraction Problem – A Great Evil

There is a great evil Spirit that is haunting the streets of code in the land of programmers. It’s a Spirit of obfuscation and twisting things into what they are not. The Spirit wanders around on the loose looking for someone, and it finds ready victims among the ranks of new programmers and the innocent […]

Read more