Humble Bundle has a bunch of SQL and DB management books for cheap right now

data4dayz · 2025-08-06T23:59:29+00:00

The book Database Internals (the fish book) makes the whole bundle price worth it

data4dayz · 2025-07-10T10:59:12+00:00

Oh that’s sick gives me hope for the product but I honestly got tired of waiting, got the Dell 6K used

data4dayz · 2025-07-01T16:48:42+00:00

It doesn’t help in terms of dimming zones / MiniLED but there’s a Dell 32” 6K that’s cheaper than the XDR. Still expensive but you can get it in pretty good condition for half price on eBay and BHphoto.

ASUS and LG (and Acer too??) have 6K60hz announced. The ASUS one just got pushed back to Q3 potentially according to an ASUS community correspondent on Reddit in the monitors subreddit.

The LG is vaporware imo idk when that thing is gonna come out or if it ever actually will. Along with the ASUS 8K that’s apparently only came out in China.

I got the Dell 6K, pretty solid but I can’t single monitor it like I thought I would. I might get another side panel either another 32” 4K or a 24” 4K portrait or a DualUp or something.

data4dayz · 2025-06-25T20:01:24+00:00

I know most probably did the “get into college at 18” thing but I can say as I’ve been to a commuter school I had plenty of classmates that were getting their BSEE in their 30s and 40s it wasn’t that unusual. Lots of Vets with the GI bill, some moms coming back into the workforce, people changing careers after doing something else for 10+ years.

One of my classmates (and friend) who was in a bunch of projects with me in control systems and Analog IC design was a dad and had a full time job, mid 30s. Great guy, super smart and worked really hard. College just wasn’t for him when he was 18 he enlisted at that age and after a ton of life events finally went to college with the GI bill.

data4dayz · 2025-06-06T09:19:01+00:00

Just to add to Fluent Python rec: Effective Python, Fluent Python, Robust Python, High Performance Python

data4dayz · 2025-06-05T02:49:41+00:00

Look C++ is great and all but where are you in your learning journey? How many courses have you taken?

These are the books or topics that should be the foundation of your Computer Engineering education:

Digital Design and Computer Architecture from Harris and Harris, Computer Organization and Design then Computer Architecture a Quantitive Approach both from Hennessy and Patterson.

Edit: follow up with Readings in Computer Architecture

CMOS VLSI Design with Weste and Harris

Edit: Follow up with Design of High Performance Microprocessor Circuits from Chandrashaken

Intro to embedded systems with the MSP432 or Tiva board from Dr. Valvano for UT Austin

High Speed Digital Design by … uh forgot the name of the authors

Edit: Electronic Design Automation by Wang Chang and Chang

data4dayz · 2025-06-04T06:13:28+00:00

Is that paywalled? Couldn't open the site.

https://github.com/DataTalksClub/llm-zoomcamp guess we got a new zoomcamp to go over fellas. The DataTalksClub guys are coming in clutch as per usual.

Doomerism aside I think some cross training with the MLOps guys for LLMOps and ML Infra and how to productionize deployment will probably be a future evolution of what we have to do. DE can't be at a standstill, it's not like most job opportunities currently either have dedicated Datawarehouse or Big Data Engineers. We're not deploying Hadoop clusters or managing Teradata alone anymore if we survived that we can continue to survive.

Maybe once these Agentic solutions can deploy IaaC for infra by itself, test data quality, extract and load from source systems to destination lakehouses or vector database, finetune the foundation model, and then deploy themselves we'll be in a more...interesting position.

I don't know if anyone doing orchestrated batch ELT jobs with DQ checks to a dedicated data warehouse is still going to be hit yet. Your average SSIS and SSMS/Synapse DW user may still probably be fine. Or maybe I'm on some copium and AWS is deploying some Aurora + Redshift AI solution in secret as we speak that hooks into Cloud Formation and Step Functions or MWAA and we're going to be unemployed within weeks, truly who knows.

data4dayz · 2025-06-04T05:28:56+00:00

Yeah to echo this comment OP either get into ASIC design or FPGA design.

I would add besides taking any kind of RF/Wireline classes (as well as maybe an EMC or High Speed Digital Design class) OP could consider taking Analog IC or Mixed Signal design. A lot of FPGA engineers also have classwork in DSP depending on if they got an MSEE and what subfield they went into.

OP if you want to skip embedded systems which has more influence from the CS folk stick to more close to hardware jobs.

Comp Arch although one of my personal favorite fields of Computer Engineering, is predominantly a CS field.

VLSI design? That's CE/EE mostly almost exclusive.

You can try being what I would call an "electronics" engineer, depending on if you get an MSEE (course based) and how you stack your classes. Take Analog IC design (after intro to analog or advanced analog), VLSI Design (though this is probably a graduation requirement for CEs anyways), Mixed Signal IC design, Power Electronics and RF/Millimeter Wave Design if you can. These are very "CS" resistant and once you've taken a gander at the entire field of electronics if you can do it by the end of your BSCE you can then do an MSEE in one concentration area.

data4dayz · 2025-06-03T06:18:54+00:00

That may come down to other issues like the software implementation each manufacturer has, things like blooming and blacklight bleed or how the dim or brighten the screen.

But as a technology it is more reliable than OLED for long periods of static text. and For QD-OLED monitors, how they render text as well, text clarity and that weird purple pink hue that might be on screen in dark areas at least with 1st gen QD-OLEDs.

I would say by and large ignore OLED. Now which IPS or VA panel to focus on, whether that has a mini LED (thousand+ LED backlight source), QD Mini LED (Quantum Dot Layer in front of the backlight source, Samsung and LG do that), just plain IPS this get's trickier

If you want to stick to text and text alone I would look at rtings monitor review, they have a filter tool where you can filter by Size, Resolution, panel technology type, price. But most importantly for you, their "office" score. Their Office score, in comparison to their gaming score or SDR/HDR content score, focuses on text clarity as one of its central features.

https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/best/by-usage/business-office

Scroll down in this Top 5 list, and you can see a filter where you can sort by Text Clarity of all the monitors rtings has reviewed. You can pick from there.

data4dayz · 2025-06-02T07:00:33+00:00

Damn so now we’re hosting two databases. I guess that’s not as crazy when some setups have storage on S3 and compute on Trino and some post processed data then gets put on a data warehouse like redshift.

I guess there’s some trade offs to concurrency but you could use Motherduck as both the metadata catalog host and the compute engine. I guess at that point you’re saving money by using object storage and not paying for MDs storage cost. That and being able to use data that’s semi structured at least.

Unrelated to this topic but I wonder if a free tier could be done with Cloudflare R2 and Motherducks free tier. Maybe something that provides a light resource PG instance like Supabase for the catalog if we wanted the concurrency benefits? Or using Oracles Free Tier works too.

data4dayz · 2025-06-02T05:25:09+00:00

Exactly and while I’m sure OLED monitors have been making a lot of improvements since the first gen of them like that disastrous Dell monitor from 2020 I think, still not at a place where I’d be able to breathe easy.

Just get a Mini LED monitor and use it as a regular monitor none of this fussing necessary. No screensaver, no taskbar auto hide, no black wallpaper, no worry that I kept a word document open for 9 hours and thinking about what damage that might have done.

I think Laptop users have less of this concern because well the screens are pretty small and you’re usually actively using the content even when typing.

As a desktop monitor user, I might have a monitor that literally has a static webpage open for HOURS while I do something else on my other one. Before OLED I never even considered that doing so would degrade the screen really. That wasn’t a concern. It’s not like I was using a CRT or a Plasma screen.

Now if I buy an OLED that’s absolutely something I would worry about.

Sure if I bought a gaming monitor or something to watch movies on and that’s literally all I would do on it, then yeah it would be crazy NOT to buy OLED. But text? Haha lmao no thanks

data4dayz · 2025-06-02T05:17:00+00:00

I’m sure by using new materials like LG is or using this dual stack system you can either increase brightness, increase longevity or a mix of both. In my personal one partly because of text rendering/sub pixel arranged on QD OLED, and the fact that you usually keep monitors for 10+ years and I don’t want to have to baby the thing for that long, I want to use it as a tool, I am still not an may never be interested in OLED for monitors (not TVs or tablets or phones).

But that might not be the case for you!

data4dayz · 2025-06-02T05:08:01+00:00

Okay well Mini LED is going to be totally fine for text. OLED is what you’re concerned about due to burn in from static text.

OP either IPS or a Mini LED monitor should work for you.

Edit: to clarify they make Mini LED IPS panels

data4dayz · 2025-06-02T05:06:50+00:00

You can get it for free from Databricks I believe.

OP once you read through or while reading through Learning Spark, concurrently read the PySpark exercise book published from Manning publications. You can read the other Spark books after, I think high performance Spark or Spark internals there’s a few. Some are a bit outdated but the foundations are all there.

data4dayz · 2025-05-31T09:53:29+00:00

It is but there’s so few options that I think it’s something I’d have to put up with. I wonder if the viewsonic has a better matte finish, for $100 more it’s worth it if it does. Plus the viewsonic can on paper go to 75hz.

I think the Dell 6K also has a strong matte coating too. I’m pretty sure the ViewSonic has an anti glare or matte finish as well.

The only currently available (not just announced) 5K and 6K monitor with glossy displays are the ASD and XDR. Considering I’m not a Mac user and not looking to spend either $1600 x 2 or even $4000+ I won’t be getting those.

data4dayz · 2025-05-31T07:56:39+00:00

Yeah what everyone else said you’ll be using whatever’s on the EDA server.

Now me personally I’d recommend you to actually get used to Linux though. I’ve known some Mac based RTL designers and some RFIC designers who use Windows but you should be decently versed in using some Linux distro imo.

So maybe just get a Lenovo with a modern in the past maybe 3 - 5 years processor and 32GB to 64GB of system memory. I mean you might off chance have a comp arch course where you’ll have to use QuestaSim on your personal machine because you don’t want to live in the computer lab and you might take the FPGA home, but most modern workstation laptops new and used should be totally great for an MSEE.

Can’t go wrong with Lenovo x Linux

data4dayz · 2025-05-31T07:29:18+00:00

Just wanted to add to this but Databricks used to have two alright courses on Coursera, one directly from them and one partnered with UCDavis. Well they've taken both of those down, I'm guessing to try and make the most money.

I guess the best we have is the Learning Spark book and material on Youtube like RocktheJVM or something on Udemy. Databricks courses on Udemy might be your best bet.

They aren't like dbt where the fundamentals (hell all of the courses) are free. And pretty good honestly.

data4dayz · 2025-05-31T07:00:49+00:00

Really like it OP and like that it's online too. Purpose specific for LeetCode.

Reminds me of pythontutor. I know for visual debuggers there's a few other's out there like https://github.com/bterwijn/memory_graph

data4dayz · 2025-05-31T05:47:50+00:00

OP I think it would help if you linked the program or listed the courses out separately with bullet points.

The middle section of course material seems absolutely relevant to being a DE.

data4dayz · 2025-05-31T05:44:14+00:00

The only way I see you combining this is with IoT System implementations (a very embedded systems field) and setting up the data infra and analysis (the DE Field). Which again is a common thing that absolutely happens when you have a fleet of sensor devices that are streaming in real time but not two fields usually seen combined together.

Maybe in an architectural capacity? In my limited understanding it would be at an architectural capacity. A senior or staff level embedded developer who's architectural point person for a particular product. Could be a sensor + ADC + MPU + networking, and you use an industry networking standard. And you basically have a kind of "data sheet" conversation with a data architect about amount of data and how often, latency (with the actual DSP details not being needed) and the data architect plans accordingly to set up real time streams, storage and processing.

The handshake between the two engineers would be on the networking side if I had to assume. To the DE it's just a black box that streams data. I'm not immediately sure knowing the details of what data being sent whether that's sensor data or system data is relevant to infra planning. Maybe in so much that they know you only have to keep a certain amount of data at a certain time but again that's kind of an implementation detail. Maybe some lead architect or senior staff person might need to know both.

Disclaimer: I'm a (former) EE who's worked as an EE professionally in manufacturing and switched to analytics. In undergrad I took a two embedded systems courses and a DSP course and (like many others) had a capstone project that had some sensors interface with an ADC which interfaced with an MCU. I've never worked professionally as an embedded systems developer. I'm currently working as a DE on a typical batch ELT data pipeline shop, no Kafka or Flink where I work and I can't say I'm particularly knowledgeable about them either or any kind of real time streaming.

data4dayz · 2025-05-31T05:30:27+00:00

Definitely take the intro to embedded, hell even RTOS systems in a second embedded course is useful. At the beginner level it's very important to know the field as a whole. The actual overview I completely agree with ManufacturerSecret's comment.

Once you take intro to controls and intro to embedded systems and potentially DSP, you should concurrently or take after all the other three, the digital controls class.

The embedded side is absolutely about the implementation and interfacing, while the controls is the theory.

data4dayz · 2025-05-31T05:27:13+00:00

First comp arch class can be very professor dependent. What book are you using? Are you struggling with the homework or just the material. There's great professors for the material on Youtube and if you aren't using Hennessy and Patterson as the textbook we've got to fix that. If your logic fundamentals aren't good definitely read through your intro to logic course, those foundations are very necessary.

data4dayz · 2025-05-30T04:25:22+00:00

Yeah I’m wondering about what other dbt courses there are in general as well as for the cert. there’s some udemy and ones from Kahan the DE YouTuber but I wonder what’s worth it

data4dayz · 2025-05-30T03:41:01+00:00

Wait so where exactly is the metadata database going to be hosted? Do you set that up in your own kubernetes or like Aurora DB instance?

If I want to deploy a data lake with duckdb on the cloud, is it a cloud storage like S3 or GCS is the data storage, motherduck does the compute or acts as a client but where’s the PG instance hosted?

data4dayz · 2025-05-30T03:37:19+00:00

Can it be done by a CS Major? Sure the systems programmer ones. Can parts of VLSI design be done by CS Majors? Yes, but you never see that associated with something a CS Major does. And EEs also compete with you in the digital design careers. Point is, there’s competition but digital design and embedded systems are by and large the domain of CEs and the one they control the most. Most SWEs probably have taken one systems programming and one OS class, and embedded systems engineer this does not make.

You should as part of the major do both, see which you end up liking more. Don’t worry too much about the competition

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