Haven’t looked into it but do shops offer lube analysis services? Yeah you could send out your own sample to a lab, having it as a shop service would be way more accessible to people.

Though, in my experience, getting people to commit can be a pain, lots of “yeah I know we have a long p-f interval and it’s super noticeable before it functionally fails, but it’s not that much effort so I’m doing needless maintenance anyhow just in case”, which end of the day you do you.

Was my first experience with source control, a bunch of Gary’s Mod mods were distributed that way, think I recall wiretool doing that, spacebuild was for sure, predated my work use by like 5ish years.

I didn’t hate it but definitely prefer git, but I’ll take literally anything over not having it,

Considering that is nearly exactly some of the answers I’ve received during the technical part of interviews for jr data eng, you’re probably not far off.

Shit I’ve seen solutions done up that look like that, fighting the optimiser every step (amongst other things)

I worked in primary metals for a while, core business applications still ran on mainframes, they had a project to move some of them to SAP that apparently had the same timelines as nuclear fusion (perpetually x years away).

Thanks for that, Bugdom also looks familiar!

Mine had a bunch of iMac g3s, eMacs came toward grade 8.

Games weren’t explicitly forbidden, just needed to finish work first, new Cross Country Canada, math circus and Oregon trail were the games I recall the most of. There was this one game though I can’t recall the name of but the concept was interesting, you played as a time travelling velociraptor and had to save dinosaur eggs from extinction, was like a 3rd person shooter, I have no idea why that was on school computers

Edit: was Nanosaur

In the distant year of 4122, a dinosaur species, Nanosaurs, rule the Earth. Their civilization originated from a group of human scientists who experimented with genetic engineering. Their experimentation led them to resurrect the extinct dinosaur species; however, their victory was short-lived, as a disastrous plague brought the end of their civilization itself. The few dinosaurs resurrected were lent an unusual amount of intelligence from their human creators, leaving them to expand on their growing civilization. However, as the Nanosaurs were the only species on Earth, inbreeding was the only possible choice of reproduction. This method largely affected the intelligence of the various offspring, and slowly began to pose a threat to their once-intelligent society.

The Nanosaur government offers a quest that involves time traveling into the year 65 million BC, where the five eggs of ancient dinosaur species must be retrieved and placed in a time portal leading to the present year. Their high-ranking agent, a brown Deinonychus Nanosaur, is chosen to participate in this mission. On the day of her mission, she is teleported to the past via a time machine in a Nanosaur laboratory.

Unironically yeah, sitting on the other side of the table it’s painfully obvious when people do resume projects. I’d rather talk to you about something you’re passionate about.

I have to wonder if some of it is comfort or familiarity, I had a negative reaction to python the first time I ever tried it for example, hated the indent syntax for whatever reason.

I’m fine with bash for ci/cd activities, for what you’re talking about I’d maybe use bash to control/schedule running of a script in something like python to query and push to an api but I do totally get using the tools you have available.

I use bash a lot for automation but PowerShell is really nice for tasks like this and has been available in linux for a while. Seen it deployed into production for more or less this task, grabbing data from a sql server table and passing to SharePoint. It’s more powerful than a shell language probably needs to be, but it’s legitimately one of the nicer products MS has done.

End of the day, use the right tool for the job at hand and be aware of risks. You can totally make web requests from sql server using ole automation procedures, set up a trigger to fire on update and send data to an api from a stored proc, if I recall there’s a reason they’re disabled by default (it’s been a very long time) but you can do it.

Yeah, been dealing with that a bunch lately too, I’ve started pushing them towards the documentation directly (though to be fair, sometimes that’s ass or nearly nonexistent) with some success.

Sqlbi for Power BI, Marco and Alberto have pretty much been my go to in that world for probably near a decade (though I haven’t really done a lot of that in a long while).

Could use Polars, afaik it supports streaming from CSVs too, and frankly the syntax is so much nicer than pandas coming from spark land.

Do you need to persist? What are you doing with them? A really common pattern for analytics is landing those in something like Parquet, Delta, less frequently seen Avro or ORC and then working right off that. If they don’t change, it’s an option. 100 gigs of CSVs will take some time to write to a database depending on resources, tools, db flavour, tbf writing into a compressed format takes time too, but saves you managing databases (unless you want to, just presenting some alternates)

Could look at a document db, again, will take time to ingest and index, but definitely another tool, I’ve touched elastic and stood up mongo before, but Solr is around and built on top of lucene which I knew elastic was but apparently so is mongo.

Edit: searchable? I’d look into a document db, it’s quite literally what they’re meant for, all of those I mentioned are used for enterprise search.

Postgres runs well in a container in my experience and is nice to work with, def support that. I know sqlite works well, but nice to have a system sometimes.

I was originally going to to go the docker route but honestly just ended up going the binary route and leaving it using sqlite as it’s good enough for now. It’s pretty well documented and a chunk of the prereqs I already had, like the git user creation.

Did have SSH auth issues though, probably becauae I didn’t fully cleanup after uninstalling gitlab (oops), had them in parallel for a bit to migrate the repos, gitlab had it trying to use gitlab-shell which didn’t exist anymore. Probably a better/proper solution but what worked was changing the git user’s home directory back to /home/git as gitlab had it using a gitlab config directory. I welcome anyone giving me a better/cleaner solution for this, on my to do list to do some more cleanup.

I just flipped my home git to forgejo from gitlab, gitlab just had a bunch of features I wasn’t using, forgejo was easy to setup and it has a nice interface. I’m just using it for source control right now, still probably huge overkill but eh

Taco according to the cube rule

Seriously though, it’s been some time be afaik any microsoft product file that ends in x, .docx, .xlsx, .pbix are all just archives and you can totally interact with them programmatically if you want. Really easy to corrupt them but hey, found it interesting years ago.

Heck, there are already ISO language standards, and there’s ISO Software Lifecycle standards, it’s absolutely not a leap to move into standards adhering processes. It’s not like there’s no desire to do it either, code standards alone, how many times have you had discussions about style guides and coding standards company wide? It makes things more consistent and easier for different developers to maintain.

Semi related, I see a lot of non-iso standard SQL that’s a pain if you do migrations or refactors, often even just sucks to read through (old school oracle joins look really strange and aren’t clear compared to iso standard joins). I really wish people would adhere to the standards as much as possible.

I realised you meant this over lunch, I’m a mech eng who changed disciplines into software (data and systems mainly) over my career, I 100% feel you, I have seen enough colleagues do things that wouldn’t fly in other disciplines, it’s definitely put me off a number of times. I’m personally for rubber stamping by a PEng and the responsibility that comes with that. There’s enough regulatory and ethical considerations just in data usage that warrants an engineering review, systems designed for compliance should be stamped too.

Really bothers me sometimes how wildwest things are.

Edit: see my response, realised the comment was about engineering accountability which I 100% agree with, leaving my original post untouched aside from a typo that’s annoying me.

I respectfully disagree coming from a reliability POV, you won’t address culture or processes that enable a person to make a mistake. With the exception of malice or negligence, no one does something like this in a vacuum; insufficient or incorrect training, unreasonable pressure, poorly designed processes, a culture that enables actions that lead to failure.

Example I recall from when I worked manufacturing, operator runs a piece of equipment that joins pieces together in manual rather than automatic, failed to return it to a ready flag and caused a line stop. Yeah, operator did something outside of process and caused an issue, clear cut right? Send them home? That was a symptom, not a cause, the operator ran in manual because the auto cycle time was borderline causing linestops, especially on the material being run. The operator was also using manual as there were some location sensors that had issues with that material and there was incoming quality issues, so running manually, while not standard procedure, was a work around to handle processing issues, we also found that culturally, a lot of the operators did not trust the auto cycles and would often override. The operator was unlucky, if we just put all the “accountability” on them we’d never have started projects to improve reliability at that location and change the automation to flick over that flag the operator forgot about if conditions were met regardless.

Accountability is important, but it needs to be applied where appropriate, if someone is being negligent or malicious, yeah there’s consequences, but it’s limiting to focus on that only. You can implement what you suggest that the devs get accountability for any failure so they’re “empowered”, but if your culture doesn’t enable them to say no or make them feel comfortable to do so, you’re not doing anything that will actually prevent an issue in the future.

Besides, I’d almost consider it a PPE control and those are on the bottom of the controls hierarchy with administrative just above it, yes I’m applying oh&s to software because risk is risk conceptually, automated tests, multi phase approvals etc. All of those are better controls than relying on a single developer saying no.