I learned a couple years back that I have ADHD. Insert a half-serious joke about RFK Jr. throwing me into the camps. Since then, I've explored fidget toys as a way to focus better during meetings or when spending some time thinking, and they've really helped.A few months ago, I stumbled on something even better. I...

The number one thing that keeps getting hammered home to me, by experience and the folks at work I'm responsible to, is that the point of data/analytics engineering is to generate value for the business.New pipelines and data sources don't inherently create any value. Usually, they're a net loss. Doing your own job...

I finally finished my albatross project: replicating all our Postgres shards to Databricks. This is great news.In broad strokes, we export our Postgres databases daily from the backup snapshot, then ingest those Parquet snapshots with Databricks. Previously, we had done a hacked-together variant of the same process...

Every morning I start the day by making coffee, feeding the cats, heating up a hot breakfast for myself, and then I sit with my coffee, a lap cat, and my happy light for 30-60 minutes. This trio of activities (coffee, food, light) happens as soon as I can after waking up, every single day of the dark months.Please...

It's Sunday, and I was able to get some downtime at work to do some upgrades behind the scenes. I've been working on this data pipeline for months, and today I finally got to enable the first bit of it in production. We still have quite a bit of work left to do, but this is a step in the right direction!A few...

I've been writing here for about a year and this is my 100th post. It's been quite a year for all of us, that much is certain.I went to IrelandI have been at my current employer for longer than I've been at any startup (though a fraction of the time I spent at a corporate job)I traveled to Boston at least 6 times to...

I can't argue with most of these picks! Hades II is my personal Game of the Year, but BALL x PIT was also spectacular. I tried Expedition 33 but it never really quite landed for me, and I got most of the way through Dragon Age: The Veilguard before getting bored. Of course, I played more Rimworld than anything...

Pablo recently added me to powrss[1], and wrote about reading the web seasonally[2]. When I first started using RSS, I thought I’d found this great tool for keeping tabs on news, current events, and stuff I should and do care about. After adding newspapers, blogs, magazines, publications, YouTube channels and...

At this moment, I'm feeling exhausted. I've had a cold or something for last 15 days and am now on some antibiotics to try to clear up any bacterial infection. I've been making a sizable dent in a Costco-sized bottle of generic Mucinex DM. The last couple weeks have been rough, even if you don't work in government....

Thanks to Pablo for adding me to the group! I love stuff like powRSS and indieblog, and it's how I find most of my quality reads other than Kottke. Long live the webring[1]! Technically neither is a webring based on Wikipedia's definition, but it'

Catalog of Custom 3D Prints | Peter LyonsStaff Engineer, Back EndPeter LyonsPeter LyonsPeter made a catalog of his 3D prints. He's heavily on the side of functional 3D printing (as opposed to artistic or monetizable prints) which is something I appreciate. I got a printer

I've been working remotely (or living at my office) since lockdowns first started in March 2020. That's 5.5 years of remote work, and I'm thriving. I can stim, pet my cats, sit weirdly, or fart without worrying what anyone will think. It'