Transitioning to Senior Engineer

It’s probably what every single person wants to accomplish first after they’ve been writing code for a year professionally. How do I get to Senior Engineer? What skills do I need? “I am a good coder, give me the Senior Engineer title.”

Sadly, most Junior and Mid-Level Engineers think that being a Senior Engineer is all about coding, when in fact, it’s not. Being good at writing code is only the first step, the are many other way harder skills to learn to grow from Junior to Senior Engineer.

Databricks Doubles Cost. Reddit Explodes. I’m in Trouble!

I recently did a post on Linkedin and Reddit about Databricks removing Standard Tier and forcing folks into Unity Catalog. The post got big traction and blew up, more than I thought. Enough for the Databricks folk to hunt me down at work and tell me I’m naughty.

I will be writing a more in-depth post soon on Substack about the downsides of Vendor Lockin and how Data Teams should think about such things.

Writing Apache Spark with Rust! Spark Connect Introduced.

I never thought I would live to see the day, it’s crazy. I’m not sure who’s idea it was to make it possible to write Apache Spark with Rust, Golang, or Python … but they are all genius.

As of Apache Spark 3.4 it is now possible to use Spark Connect … a thin API client on a Spark Cluster ontop of the DataFrame API.

You can now connect backend systems and code, using Rust or Golang etc, to a Spark Server and run commands and get results remotely. Simply amazing.  A new era of tools and products is going to be unleashed on us.  We are no longer chained to the JVM. The walls have been broken down. The future is bright.

How to JOIN datasets in Polars … compared to Pandas.

It’s been a while since I wrote about Polars on this blog, I’ve been remiss. Some time ago I wrote a very simple comparison of switching from Pandas to Polars, I didn’t put much real effort into it, yet it was popular, so this is my attempt at trying to expand on that topic a little.

Recently, while laying flat on back on my sunporch soaking up the vitamin D beating down on me, dreaming about code, which I always do, it struck me.

Read more

Building Databricks Data Pipelines 101

Have you ever wondered at a high level what it’s like to build production-level data pipelines on Databricks? What does it look like, what tools do you use?

How To Build and Open Source PYPI Python Package

Ever wondered how to build and end-to-end project for an Open Source Python Package that gets published to PYPI? I built out lakescuman open-source package to help with Databricks Unity Catalog Delta Lake tables querying with Polars, DuckDB, or PyArrow. https://github.com/danielbeach/lakescum

The Path To Senior Engineer

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

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 room.

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 ChatGPT and CoPilot hit the market. In fact, the opposite is true, there will be more Software jobs than ever, not less.

AI tools might look pretty in a video, but in reality, by those who use them, the are very bad at programming still and don’t do a very good job. Most of what a Senior Engineer does that makes them Senior is not that spitting out of gobs of code. Any dingdong can do that.

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.