jellyfishbeaver

How do you all handle code review for projects that use specific frameworks or libraries? I write a lot of PySpark and the "flavour" of code is sort of different than traditional Python. AI code reviewers tend to nitpick conventions and common patterns in these libraries, so I find it not very helpful.

There are so many stupid "courses" and SaaS tools doing this I imagine that the value of the many of these certificates is close to 0.

Many of them you can simply take the exam over and over until you pass, and then stick a shiny stupid badge on your LinkedIn profile.

Can anyone attest if young people are actually taking up cigarettes again? I was talking with a friend that teaches teenagers and she was explaining how many students that once were getting in trouble for vaping/pouches have now turned on to cigarettes. Completely boggles my mind - I thought the newer generation had a much stronger aversion to physical cigarettes.

Same attitudes as others in this thread.

For personal projects and side company, I get to join in on some of the fun and really multiply the amount of work I can get through. I tend to like to iterate on a project or code base for awhile, thinking about it and then tearing things down and rebuilding it until I arrive at what I think is a good implementation. Claude Code has been a really great companion for this. I'd wager that we're going to see a new cohort of successful small or solo-founder companies that come around because of tools like this.

For work, I would say 60% of my company's AI usage is probably useless. Lots of churning out code and documents that generate no real value or are never used a second time. I get the sense that the often claimed "10x more productive" is not actually that, and we are creating a whole flood of problems and technical debt that we won't be able to prompt ourselves out of. The benefit I have mostly seen myself so far is freeing up time and automating tedious tasks and grunt work.

Having been on way too many middle-of-the-night Zoom calls watching my company's DevOps and development teams aimlessly troubleshoot issues with containers and similar cloud first technologies, I am convinced that nobody really understands what's happening.

Are there really any other managed Spark/full data platform providers that come close to the level of ergonomics and maturity of Databricks? I agree some of their features are half-baked and you can turn on some dangerous cash faucets if you don't have a very diligent administrator, but I have not come across anything that our developers (fresh grads up to seasoned Spark veterans) liked as much as Databricks.

We actually baked a rule to catch UDF usage into our Python linter. Almost always, a UDF can be refactored to use only native PySpark functions.

Yep, exactly. You couldn't reach the computer unless you undid the knot.

My dad used to tie up the Ethernet cable on our family's home router and hide it in a closet. The knots were to prevent us from reconnecting the router and putting it back before he got back home. He'd be able to tell if we tried since he was the only one able to tie that special knot :)

All to prevent my siblings and I from wasting our summers on Runescape or Miniclip or something. Looking back, the hours we were playing each day is nothing compared to the hours he spends scrolling through crap these days. My dad worked in such an intellectually stimulating job before, so it's baffling to see that he chooses to do this all day. I imagine most older parents are in the same boat these days. It has made me hate social media, YouTube, short videos, et al. even more

I had a chuckle on my way home yesterday. Standing on the train platform and seeing "Next departure in: (Vercel Connection Error)" on the screen. :P

Great post. I'm still going through this process. I was offered the management cap a few years ago as an escape from the drudgery I was dealing with at the time. Now I am not sure if I regret it or not.

Comments in the code for items that need to be addressed before final review. e.g. "XXX: Blah blah.." or "TODO: Investigate blah blah". For other types of notes useful to future me or someone else coming back to the task/feature in the future, mostly Jira comments

Seems like a whole new market is opening for people looking to game the hiring process. In my short few years being involved in interviewing, I've seen 1) obvious AI use off screen/a second person feeding answers 2) Person A showing up for the interview process and Person B showing up after being hired 3) candidates covering their lips moving with a large headset mic and someone else speaking for them.

Wild

I work as a data engineer in the financial services industry, and I am still amazed that CSV remains the preferred delivery format for many of our customers. We're talking datasets that cost hundreds of thousands of dollar to subscribe to.

"You have a REST API? Parquet format available? Delivery via S3? Databricks, you say? No thanks, please send us daily files in zipped CSV format on FTP."