Sadly, on contrary, I avoid amazon in UK as much as possible. I just had too many adventures. This includes being sent e.g. a fake product in a box of dimensions resembling the ordered expensive one (at least the refund is instant). Or long discussions turns-out-scamming sellers who "dispatch" products not giving any tracking information (finally getting a refund after weeks).
The last straw were pretty often just bad quality products sold by sellers who are advertised as Amazon's "Top Choice", etc. Amazon has just became a cheap quality bazaar for me and if I need to spend time to cherry pick a possibly fine quality product, then, no, thank you.
I just try to search and order from local UK websites or stores. These often offer comparable or even better prices (esp. books), plus good contact with the seller and very often a better quality. Amazon just being either my last resort if I cannot buy a product in a local mom and pop store. With possibility of not even receiving a genuine product I prefer to buy, especially electronics, just directly in normal shops.
Amazon commingles all their merch when they're fulfilling a purchase, even when they're the seller.
Best to avoid buying any items sold both by Amazon and a FBA seller; they're nearly guaranteed to be commingled, running you the risk of getting a third party's FBA counterfeit. But that'll probably get rid of a large chunk of your shopping list.
I have no idea why some people have such vastly different experiences shopping at Amazon UK. I've made 242 orders with them last year(pandemic, locked up in the house, don't judge), didn't have a single problem with any of those 242 orders. Few times I wanted to return something they just refunded me and I didn't even have to send it back. Compared to buying from anywhere else like Currys which is a shit show, I'd purchase from Amazon over anyone else.
Hey, keep in mind that we are living now in a bit extraordinary times. Your boss is also human as you. He may have more important things in his mind at the moment rather than you doing your work (and seems you are doing your job well).
During these silent months he might have had gone through covid. Or someone from his family. You don't know.
Remember that we, apart from being engineers, coders, solving business problems, whatever, we also also human and communication is a key. If I can suggest, just give him heads up, give a short report and ask how are things as it's been a while since you spoke. And that you hope that things are fine in these extraordinary times.
You cannot imagine how much people are struggling at work within these times, where on surface all seems fine.
I would recommend you check out Airflow 2.0. It's a pretty major rebuild in a whole lot of ways (new UI, new DAG API, up to TEN TIMES faster task execution, multiple schedulers at once). I've actually had friends prepared to pick Prefect over Airflow until they tried 2.0. We put a lot of work into it, including extensive QA time to ensure that it runs reliably.
The thing Atlassian had going for them is that we could get our non-technical people to use their stuff, understand it, and even customize it themselves to meet their needs.
This. Although personally I have never been a big fan of clunky Atlassian products and as a developer would prefer more productive tools, but getting key non-technical stakeholders use the same system as devs teams is a big win.
I'm afraid that what has happened is something unfortunately quite normal in UK and it's a part of the general work culture. That is, everyone is just doing part of their job and following the protocol, but nothing more. Something is outside of the protocol or task description? Not my problem. Shall I double check the number of rows in the excel with Covid data that I am supposed to send to my supervisor? Oh, come on, who cares.
Similarly in Spain. In large cities like Madrid or Barcelona these guys are owning properties, running both small and large businesses and very often avoiding taxes (try to ask in one of small venues for a bill and be sure then to check it). Moreover, quite some properties are Chinese-owned winding up the rental prices for local population, which were already pumped up by popularity of short-term holiday rentals such as AirBnB. These have been pretty well known problems to local population, but nobody up is doing anything about it, since it is an easy and quick money.
> every pharma company has a decent bunch of PhDs building machine learning models for a variety of reasons. Those models aren't as headline catching but rather they improve certain unglamorous business processes by X%. Taken as a whole that adds up to a lot of value for those companies.
This!
Although I am not an expert in AI field or AI-based methods, I have been working as an s/w engineer / plumber / fireman in projects deploying some AI-based methods and models in production. These methods are nothing catchy, that would unlikely get into headlines, nothing like self-driving cars, etc. But they are just pretty effective applied in a quite well defined scope improving parts of existing processes. These would be considered by many as 'boring' and are related e.g. with improving the data acquisition processes, such as, improving quality of text extraction from images or improving recognition of named entities from free text by using a tailored neural network model in the system. Nothing big nor fancy, but for the business it makes a significant difference.
So, on one hand, yes, there's a lot of hype for applying AI-based methods for just anything and wanting to show to investors using the keywords for getting more $$$. But on the other hand, having a well scoped use-case with clear understanding on what method and why, it can bring pretty good results. However, as a community, we are still trying to catch-up with all the recent advancements in AI-based field, and trying to understand when to use XYZ and why over well established 'classical' approaches. These are / will be another tools in our toolbox and this fact cannot be ignored.
Also see: Apache Superset [0] -- this one looks really like a fully fledged data exploration and visualisation suite, being a possible free and open source alternative to Microsoft Power BI [1]. Using the official / own image can be also deployed as a service running in a local infrastructure.
Would be curious for a comparison between all the mentioned data vis suites in this thread actually.
1) Redash and Falcon focus on people that want to do visualizations on top of SQL
2) Superset, Tableau and PowerBI focus on people that want to do visualizations with a UI
3) Metabase and SeekTable focus on people that want to do quick analysis (they are the closest to an Excel replacement)
I have been using group 2) for 3 something years, I am not too excited by them, Superset is cool, Tableau and PowerBI value has been blown out of proportion by marketing. Group 3) is very promising but for some reason more niche although because of their pricing structure they scale as well as Excel (i.e. you can have thousands of users building stuff in Metabase no problem). Group 1) not sure what to say there, I guess it would be my favorite but SQL becomes messy after the first join.
The reality check is that none of those tools stands on its own. Without a database, data prep and security setup they are more or less fancy toys. Unfortunately very few companies understand how to set all of this up in a way that users can actually work with it. So I keep seeing a lot of half done, super expensive, setups in Tableau and PowerBI that have not delivered what they were promising.
Also, I agree with chriddyp that most companies would rather own their analytics for stuff that is customer facing. For internal facing dashboards the dashboarding BI tools are OK (although I lean more on group 3) than group 2)).
> The reality check is that none of those tools stands on its own.
so true! Only exception is maybe CSV data.
Re SeekTable: it also supports usage scenario when data sources ('cubes') are configured by power user (with some IT background), and shares cubes/reports to others that use simple web UI to create their own reports - and this requires paid subscription for publisher only ($25/mo).
And there is another Apache project : Apache Hue, as a django web app
I d put between group 1) and 2). Not in 3), because there is not "quick charts", and datasources are not managed at application level but in configuration files and require more "administration" tasks.
Curious where you would consider chart.io to fall in this ecosystem?
I have been using it for its seamless AWS Athena integration to get a handle on load balancer logs when needed. However it is pretty pricey. Would love to move to an open source solution. However my use case feels a little different than what was mentioned above?
In theory you are saving some money for not using a database, redshift is also pricey. Have you considered that? The free solution is python + altair in a jupyter notebook, but you would have to decide if it is worth your time to setup.
Try to connect with the creative side of self, try to connect with the internal kid that used to love programming, try to connect with the 'creator' part of self. And at the beginning just do it for yourself, from pure curiosity, to sparkle the joy once again. Don't focus on programming but what would you like to create and using programming as a tool.
What works for me to re-connect with the technology, when once again being close or after to burn-out or in a bad cycle at work is to slow down and 'play' with the technology, and on my own pace.
Years ago I worked in gamedev, so when challenging mental times hit, I sometimes tend to come back and just 'play' a bit with graphics, visualisations, interactive environments, simulations. I am fully aware that I am not going to compare with professional game engines, but it's just to enjoy the creative process, to freely play with ideas; to no care about lines of code / modules that won't pass code review, etc. hence also not being too much restricted by any frameworks if possible. Let the ideas flow once again and let the mind create.
As a side note, not so long ago, I also bought Raspberry Pi with a pretty nice, affordable kit of sensors. Electronics is fun, when apart from creating stuff virtually, you can create it 'outside'. You can touch it, you can hear it (and even can sometimes smell it when burns) and can control stuff writing own simple scripts. Installing Jupyter Hub on Raspberry Pi and playing interactively with sensors and collected data in Python and is just another fun moment, opening further possibilities to explore.
Totally agree! I'm in a similar position, albeit not 20 years, but 3-4 years. I have realized that I have to connect with creative side of myself and do things for the enjoyment of them.
I just try to search and order from local UK websites or stores. These often offer comparable or even better prices (esp. books), plus good contact with the seller and very often a better quality. Amazon just being either my last resort if I cannot buy a product in a local mom and pop store. With possibility of not even receiving a genuine product I prefer to buy, especially electronics, just directly in normal shops.