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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I tend to write production queries more than one off analytical ones, but if your query isn’t relatively straightforward to understand, you probably modelled the data wrong in the database.

    Conceptually, inner / outer joins are relatively simple compared to other concepts you need to know when writing software professionally which is where that comment came from. If you’re a business analyst or similar and not as experienced with expressing thoughts in a structured language and understanding how to evaluate the performance of that, I understand wanting to screen for that because it’s not assumed you would be familiar with that off the bat.

    I’m coming at this from a pre-chatgpt mindset, where you are still googling for syntax and a list of which aggregations or operations are supported. Like casting data types is often different between SQL dialects.


  • DMing is great practice for running small group meetings, which are most of my work meetings.

    Learning how to keep the meeting on track, synthesizing a bunch of discussion into a coherent flow, knowing when and how to interrupt, paying attention to people who maybe need you to make space for them to interject have all been super useful skills.


  • I get DBA interviews, but don’t understand SQL interviews for software engineer type candidates. It makes some sense for like business analysts but even then, let them Google syntax.

    Like if you can’t figure out joins and subqueries in 30min of googling tops, you’re probably not a good fit for a software engineering role anyway and will hopefully have issues elsewhere in the interview screen and for syntax it’s not super exotic, you can just Google it especially for things that change depending on the dialect of SQL you’re using.








  • Developing technologies means mitigating negative externalities. You don’t just design a pressure cooker and ignore the possibility it might explode because you “can’t force people to not leave it unattended”, you spend the extra time and money to design and install a safety valve.










    1. Machine code is less portable, as new CPU optimizations and instructions are released, its easier to update a compiler to integrate those in its optimizations than regenerate and retest all of your code. Also, if you need to target different OSs, like windows vs MacOs vs Linux its easier to make portable code in something higher level like python or java.

    2. Static analysis to check for things like memory leaks or security vulnerabilities like sql injections are likely easier to do on human readable code rather than assembly.

    3. Its easier for a human to go in an tweak code that is written in human readable language rather than assembly.