Reading Update

I’ve gotten some interesting reading this week and, although I think I read quite a bit, I also think that my to read pile keeps increasing 😅. Nonetheless I want to start and finish the Database Internals so I’ll keep it piling and see if I can write an overview of it before returning to my reading updates.

Data Engineering

• Storing UTC is not a silver bullet - An interesting take on when transforming to UTC might not work (with every transformation we might loose something)
• Why We Switched Our Data Orchestration Service - Spotify moves away from Luigi to Flyte for their batch jobs. This was the first time hearing about it and I’ll be keeping an eye on it
• Database of Databases - A nice list of existing databases and respective overview of features
• How sharding a database can make it faster - A good overview on how sharding can help scale and optimize a table as it gets bigger
• Using Spark in EMR with Apache Iceberg - A very useful article on how to use iceberg on AWS EMR + jupyter notebooks

Engineering

• Why Kubernetes is important for the future of data platforms? - A take on using more of kubernetes for data intensive platforms. As I see technologies like airflow and spark move to kubernetes I tend to concur with what Mert writes
• Why I Prefer Makefiles Over package.json Scripts - At first I prefered the package.json format but after reading this I have to accept that makefile and other formats like the ones used by gradle and sbt can be more powerful
• Which is better: A single Kafka cluster to rule them all, or many? - Red hat list of pros and cons of either having a single kafka cluster or multiple ones leaning into having multiple as long as we don’t have strict requirements of ordering
• Addressing Python Dependency Confusion at Pinterest - Pinterest gives an introduction into dependency confunsion, a mechanism that allows the injection of malware into our applications, and how they deal with it
• Scripting with Go - After some months creating a CLI in go I tend to concur that for automating scripts for wide use bash isn’t a great tool while golang is presenting as a good alternative

Stay safe and Have a nice week :-)