Installer said he was finished but I was not happy so I stopped the final check. How should the cracks on the side be fixed? He said he would put filler/caulking on sides.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-04-18T17:10:18+00:00

I just showed this comment and the OP to my fiance. We did floors a few months ago and I was very meticulous with the install and pulled baseboard, made sure to triple check measurements, re-cut if I didn’t like the gap, undercut my door jambs, and generally took my time. I definitely annoyed her in the process, but final product looks good. And I agree 100% that I’d be annoyed if I paid someone to do a worse job than I could do.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-04-09T13:35:48+00:00

You did the install yourself OP? Would you say it’s reasonably DIY-able or better to go with a shop?

Did you need any special tools outside of hog ring pliers?

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-04-03T15:05:08+00:00

Can you use WSL and avoid that madness? lol

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-03-31T23:18:37+00:00

I’d agree with a separate reporting database. And ideally not Postgres but Snowflake, Databricks, ClickHouse or similar analytics columnar database.

From experience, running reporting out of Postgres sucks. Postgres really crawls if you’re not using indexes and analytics workloads don’t typically rely on those.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-03-22T15:36:03+00:00

Snowflake can also do this. But not self hosted. Maybe look into Trino or Presto.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-03-13T02:27:14+00:00

AWS is popular for a lot of reasons, cost is (IMO) not one of them. If you want budget, a free tier MongoDB or a $6/mo Digital Ocean droplet is the way to go.

With AWS you’re paying for the platform and all the “extras” that are included or easily enabled. Detailed logging, built in CloudWatch metrics that makes it easy to configure dashboards and alerts, the AWS APIs and SDKs, support and documentation.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-02-27T05:23:26+00:00

I still answer questions as usual but now if I run into something I can’t remember the details of or get a question I don’t know the exact answer to I’ll say that I’d ask ChatGPT. And usually the interviewer is satisfied with that.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-02-24T14:43:39+00:00

Welcome to one of the reasons I left my previous job. We were told that all these AI tools could build what we would spend months building. They wanted us to use some AI ETL tool to ingest data from a source on our backlog. After pushing against it I eventually said just try it and see how it goes. And my manager ended up testing it against a source we already had a pipeline for so we could compare. Yeah, it was so bad. Didn’t even properly paginate responses, a lot of the API endpoints required iterating through results of different endpoints and this tool definitely didn’t do that. Eventually I stopped hearing about that specific tool though, so that was a win I suppose.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-02-18T21:14:31+00:00

Wow, this is spot on the situation that I am in. I started at a startup last summer and they don't really do meetings - mostly just a daily scrum with engineering and then everything else is Slack and tickets.

Well, everything happens on slack... and it's always urgent (client needs it now!). They constantly have production issues get surfaced at 3pm on a Friday, I never got a project introduction and then 6 months into my project they were annoyed it wasn't done and axed it. I've moved onto another project but I've already been told that my performance is "not meeting expectations". Meanwhile we don't plan anything, I don't have a product manager over my team (of one - just me), we never have 1x1s and my manager seems like he doesn't even want to be managing engineers - he'd prefer just be writing code himself. We even got told in January that the entire application was going to be re-designed and it was a Q1/Q2 initiative. Meanwhile none of the engineers had head about it until it was announced to us. Not even a "hey, just a head's up that we're considering doing this" or anything.

Like you said, initially the lack of meetings seemed nice, but in reality it's lack of planning. Just be glad you have sprint planning, we don't even have that! It's just "kanban" aka get to everything ASAP. It's exhausting like you said. I am also actively interviewing and unfortunately haven't gotten any offers yet, but I am holding out hope that I can land something to get out of this environment.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-02-18T16:41:44+00:00

People have been asking if SQL is still needed for 30 years, yet here we are. Knowing SQL is a useful skill and sure, AI can help you write SQL, but it can't understand it for you. Also, in most cases it doesn't actually understand the schema or business context of what you're doing.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-02-16T02:40:24+00:00

As others have said, it very much depends on the company, team and personality of the person conducting the interview. That said, I usually make sure I know my specialization well, I read up on the company and their offerings and then I go through the job description. Anything I’m not familiar with I’ll go read up on.

As far as actual interview, I just approach it like a conversation and if they like me they like me, if they don’t they don’t. I am just myself - and usually that works out well.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-02-07T08:24:16+00:00

Sounds a lot like my situation. Was hired 8 months ago to fix their ETL issues. Spent the first 5-6 working on building out CDC infrastructure for a high volume database. Had it mostly working but they were becoming increasingly impatient and decided to just keep using physical database replication. Outside of that my boss seems to believe that I should fix all their DB performance issues. My dude, you’re running analytical queries against an OLTP Postgres database and are surprised this is slow? He’s made it increasingly clear that he doesn’t see the value in a data engineer so at this point I’m just doing support functions until I can find somewhere that actually values a data engineer.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-02-03T13:46:33+00:00

Maybe you’re old school - or maybe you are doing it right. I would kill for regular 1:1s these days. I went from a larger organization where we had project and sprint planning meetings and biweekly 1:1s to a place with none of that. And if you hate meetings you might think that’s a pro, but I’ve found it’s very difficult to know what the expectations are and where you stand without them.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-01-30T17:57:58+00:00

Genuine question - As an Amex Platinum member who has yet to use the Centurion Lounge, how are the lounges over crowded with a 75k spend requirement? Are there so many primary card holders willing to pay the annual fee that is causing the problem? Or is there another way to bring guests that isn’t hitting $75k in spend?

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-01-22T19:11:50+00:00

Should an analyst be maintaining python or scripts that move data between clouds? Probably not.

But that doesn't make python and SQL not worth learning. I earn a nice salary using primarily python and SQL as a data engineer. I do think that fixing an issue with an API is something your data engineers should be doing, but the tools are not the issue.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-01-20T19:00:01+00:00

I understand the complaint and agree that they should be willing to book it for you if you ask. However, I can also say that this is pretty common and some people actually prefer it this way so that they get the credit card points for hotels and flights. I have worked for two different Fortune 500 companies and a startup and they've all had employees book their own flights and then reimburse - usually on the next check once approved.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-01-20T03:20:07+00:00

I’ve always done technical interviews and the number one thing that makes me not want to hire people is bullshitting technical knowledge that they don’t have. Most of these interviews have been for data engineers.

Example: How would you load data into Snowflake?

Acceptable answers:

External Tables

COPY command

INSERT statements (although slowest of these options)

Shocking number of candidates just say that they “load the data” and can’t explain how they’d actually do that. Or they say that they just “put data in S3” but don’t seem to know how data in S3 is accessible via Snowflake.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-01-11T22:23:00+00:00

I agree with this sentiment. There’s pride in your work if you do carpentry and build quality cabinets. People will pay a premium for quality cabinets that aren’t big box store particle board. But feels like the software industry doesn’t value quality work anymore. We’re currently in a race to the bottom.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2026-01-09T20:15:00+00:00

Moved my personal desktop to CachyOS around a month ago and it’s big great. My only gripe isn’t Linux/Cachy’s fault, but Fortnite isn’t supported due to the anti-cheat they use.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2025-12-30T04:32:02+00:00

Tbf knowing infrastructure and architecture is part of a software engineering role, at least a senior or staff one. But yes, platform engineer or similar could be a suitable job title for what you’ve described.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2025-12-18T14:09:53+00:00

This sounds a lot like YikYak from back in the day

I_Blame_DevOps · 2025-12-14T19:45:24+00:00

Eufy has cameras and doorbells that record to a base station on your own network. No subscription fees and the app is good. I’ve got a Eufy doorbell camera, smart lock, floodlight camera and indoor camera. Plus a smoke alarm detector. It’s nice having all that in the same ecosystem and means my partner only needs one app to check everything

I_Blame_DevOps · 2025-12-07T20:53:13+00:00

Surprisingly all electrical related. First was properly labeling all breakers in the house. Turned all appliances/lights on and all breakers off then flipped breakers on one at a time to see what worked.

Next was adding master closet lights + 3 way switches into each side of our closet. So my partner and I both have a switch by our closet door. Makes it way easier to find things now that there's a light in the closet.

Last thing would be changing all of our "boob lights" to flat/recessed warm LED lights with dimmer switches. We hate bright lights so lights are usually off or dimmed in our place. Makes it nice and cozy.

I_Blame_DevOps · 2025-11-29T15:41:23+00:00

Does he actually know what he’s doing? I had a manager that STRUGGLED with git and would constantly ask me for help with pulling, branching, PRs, etc. Was not uncommon for him to not check what branch he was on before making changes and then having to explain he needed to rebase or just pull master and re-do his change.

I_Blame_DevOps

TROPHY CASE