sammm's comments | WingNews

sammm | 5 years ago | on: A Data Pipeline Is a Materialized View

How do you do testing out of interest? Whenever I have seen dbt used, it is usually data analysts creating new tables on the fly in data warehouse scenarios.

Maybe I am just too used to application developer workflows where models are defined in code and then there are ORMs and schema migration tools to help manage all that.

sammm | 5 years ago | on: UiPath on track to be the best-ever European seed investment

The pop-up is a little sneaky to be honest. I am quite enjoying the content sifted has been putting out recently so I decided in this instance I would create an account.

I then tried to view the article again and then the pop-up appears again with different wording, letting you know it is actually a paywall, so creating an account isn't enough.

sammm | 5 years ago | on: Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone

Did not expect to see Apache Beam mentioned as part of this conversation. Mind me asking what you mean?

sammm | 6 years ago | on: What's Next for R?

I haven’t, thank you for the suggestion. I will give it a go.

sammm | 6 years ago | on: What's Next for R?

I started at a company using Shiny for their applications and R as part of their data pipelines.

A huge pain point for us is the packaging system. It is absolutely awful. Packages constantly get overridden so we have to install packages in a specific order. Whenever I have reached out to the community (including prominent members, which have written R books) I have always been told to just use the latest version of all packages and just get on with it, which as anybody knows, isn’t always possible, especially as there are constantly breaking API changes.

I understand R’s history and that in general, it is a lot better than it use to be, but I would only recommend R is used for notebook style work and to keep it well away from production.

We have migrated to Python, which isn’t perfect, but the difference in logging and packaging has been night and day.

sammm | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: A map that shows you how far you can go for a given time or distance

Did you always have in mind that you wanted to sell it to zoopla/rightmove? What was your initial pain point that caused you to develop your idea?

sammm | 8 years ago | on: Jenkins X: a CI/CD solution for cloud applications on Kubernetes

Thanks for the question, greatly appreciated. We used GitLab on k8s when we first transitioned, but we found there were a few things we didn't quite like about the GitLab-Omnibus helm setup, so we moved it off the cluster and used the AWS EC2 AMI which was really easy to setup.

We are going to start experimenting with the new cloud native GitLab chart, but it would need to gain some maturity before we use it in production.

Do you know if the new GitLab cloud native helm chart will allow you to turn-off certain things like mattermost and prometheus? That was something that we didn't like about the omnibus chart because it exposed several extra services/ports that we didn't really want to manage/think about at the time.

sammm | 8 years ago | on: Jenkins X: a CI/CD solution for cloud applications on Kubernetes

I actually think Jenkins is way too flexible for most use cases. We moved to GitLab CI which isn't perfect, but it provides safety rails/structure/opinions that pretty much provides an answer for everything you want to do, apart from maybe obscure corner cases that might not make sense for a CI/CD tool anyways.

Also you get the close integration of your CI tool and your git repos, which is very nice from a visibility point of view.

Having said that, GitLab is trying to own all parts of the build and deployment process, which from previous HN discussions, is of great annoyance to a lot of people who want to cherry pick what they use GitLab for.