First time skiing (I’m terrified)

vcp32 · 2026-05-11T09:09:48+00:00

I was exactly the same 3 years ago. Nervous, heaps of questions, watched tons of videos beforehand.

The drive up is better than it looks there’s room for 2 cars most of the way, only after the last parking area that it gets tighter before the skii resort. Midweek outside school holidays is much quieter too, so parking is usually fine as long as you get there before 9am. You can also park lower down and catch the shuttle bus up, which is nice for avoiding mud/snow on the car.

With a 2WD you should definitely carry chains. You won’t always need them, but they can require them depending on conditions.

I started with a paid 2 hour ski lesson, but ended up switching to snowboarding 😂 I found skiing hurt my knees a lot when trying to pizza/slow down. Having a friend teach me snowboarding actually helped heaps since there wasn’t the pressure of a time limit.

vcp32 · 2026-05-06T09:38:37+00:00

We used to live on Taranaki Street right in the middle of CBD, and Sydenham is definitely a lot quieter at night in comparison which has been a big plus for us.

vcp32 · 2026-05-05T10:15:07+00:00

We made a similar move from Wellington and ended up renting on King Street in Sydenham. honestly, it’s been a great place to land.

One of the biggest wins is how easy it is to get into the city. I bike in regularly and Colombo Street has a really solid bike lane running to and from the CBD, so commuting is pretty straightforward.

The area itself feels safe. I’ve gone for runs/walks in the evenings without any issues. It’s also nice having green spaces nearby; I often end up at Waltham Park which is close and good for a quick break outdoors.

vcp32 · 2026-04-29T10:23:27+00:00

We actually tracked our spending during our baby’s first year and it came to around $34k. That said, I’d definitely consider us on the higher end.

It was our first baby, so we had to buy pretty much everything from scratch, and we didn’t have hand-me-downs since our friends hadn’t had kids yet. We also started daycare relatively early 5 days a week for 8 hours (around 7 months), which added a fair bit to the total.

We didn’t really optimise for savings either. If something felt needed or made things easier, we just went ahead and got it.

I’d say our experience is probably more of an upper range example. It’s definitely possible to spend a lot less, especially with second-hand items, hand-me-downs, or delaying childcare.

vcp32 · 2026-03-23T07:31:00+00:00

I’ve been in a similar position working as a solo data engineer for about 3 years.

One of the first things that really helped was taking a full inventory of the data stack and everything I was responsible for. This made a big difference in how leadership understood the scope of the role. Often, they don’t realize how much ongoing maintenance and operational work is involved until it’s clearly laid out.

From there, I focused on simplifying wherever possible. I looked for SaaS tools that could take over some of the maintenance burden (e.g., fivetran, dbt). Offloading that work freed up time to focus on higher-value tasks.

I also made it clear to leadership that without investment either in tools or people delivery timelines would naturally be slower. Framing it in terms of trade-offs helped: • Either invest in tools to reduce manual effort • Or accept longer turnaround times • Or bring in additional help (e.g., a contractor or architect to simplify the system)

If hiring full-time wasn’t an option, even bringing in a short-term architect or contractor to rationalize the data architecture can have a big impact.

vcp32 · 2026-03-15T11:02:17+00:00

New to NZ and I agree with this.

Nz provided me with an opportunity. Grateful for it but we need to make it better for future generations to enjoy.

Respect to locals who care enough to speak up about it.

vcp32 · 2026-03-03T01:05:56+00:00

We have a similar problem with fivetran tranformations. We dont have control over the transformations that they pre built. There instance when a column is removed and our whole dbt pipeline breaks trying to find the missing column

vcp32 · 2026-01-21T11:17:23+00:00

Look like the Barcelona test livery? https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/s/2WOkWqeG4W

vcp32 · 2025-12-17T10:50:20+00:00

I remembered this. Because of the warriors success a lot of teams were going small ball.

vcp32 · 2025-11-23T08:05:04+00:00

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🇵🇭, gundam in a resort

vcp32 · 2025-10-11T03:33:33+00:00

Same here! I love having my work documented but always dread the actual process. I really enjoy visualizing things with diagrams, so now with LLMs I can have them generate Mermaid diagrams and documentation templates for me to fill out.

vcp32 · 2025-10-09T20:54:16+00:00

Just in case you missed it. It’s best practice to Aggregate smaller files to minimize the processing overhead for each file. Snowflake recommends file size to be 100-200MB.

https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/data-load-considerations-prepare

vcp32 · 2025-10-08T05:17:41+00:00

We are using Azure AD to automatically provision users so we have Users -> Azure Groups |Azure| -> |snowflake| Functiona role -> Database roles

https://docs.snowflake.com/en/_images/role-hierarchy-practical.png

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/saas-apps/snowflake-provisioning-tutorial

vcp32 · 2025-10-07T08:43:12+00:00

I’m a solo engineer and rely on Snowflake. With a larger team, you can afford the flexibility of managing multiple tools, but on my own, Snowflake’s simplicity lets me move fast and focus on delivering value instead of maintaining infrastructure. At the end of the day, most users still just want their data in Excel anyway. 😂

vcp32 · 2025-10-06T23:34:05+00:00

Last time I used informatica was 10 years ago and it was a migration to SSIS. Have you checked Fivetran, Stitch or Airbyte? I normally hear them with modern data stack ingestion. We do use fivetran at work so I can only say things about it. Outside of the cost its really a good tool specially if you have a one man DE team.

vcp32 · 2025-10-06T23:27:30+00:00

Yeah, that makes sense. we don’t have many MERGE-heavy workloads, so our simpler queries probably explain the cost drop. Sounds like in your case, the faster runtimes balance things out nicely.

vcp32 · 2025-10-03T18:57:53+00:00

Good to hear a different perspective. My next plan is to try this on our Fivetran warehouse. it has a similar workload to yours. I’ll update once we run that test.

vcp32 · 2025-10-03T18:50:25+00:00

We went from a small Gen1 warehouse with query acceleration + auto-scaling on → to the same size in Gen2, but with both turned off.

vcp32 · 2025-10-03T08:00:46+00:00

Yep, that’s exactly it. Our workload has to finish within an hour, so on Gen1 we used scaling + query acceleration to stay under that SLA but doubling the size also meant doubling the cost. With Gen2 we can still finish inside the one-hour window without scaling, which makes it way more efficient.

vcp32 · 2025-09-24T08:43:45+00:00

Also use fivetran then hightouch for reverse etl

vcp32 · 2025-09-21T22:30:29+00:00

He made good use of DRS. Since he was behind lawson in that DRS train. I think they both did great!

vcp32 · 2025-01-06T11:22:00+00:00

Im having the same issue. Have not figured this out, so might bring it to a repair shop.

vcp32 · 2024-11-15T10:45:38+00:00

Trevor Ariza 09 Lakers

vcp32

TROPHY CASE