benrutter (u/benrutter)

benrutter commented on Code review can be better tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025... · Posted by u/sealeck

neerajsi · 3 days ago

I've used this 'suggestion' workflow in azure devops. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/introducing-the-new-pu...

benrutter · 3 days ago

I didn't know about it at all! That looks like exactly what I wanted.

So I'm back to liking dev-ops and github code reviews identically!

benrutter commented on Code review can be better tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025... · Posted by u/sealeck

jbmsf · 3 days ago

Recently, I've been wondering about the point of code review as a whole.

When I started my career, no one did code review. I'm old.

At some point, my first company grew; we hired new people and started to offshore. Suddenly, you couldn't rely on developers having good judgement... or at least being responsible for fixing their own mess.

Code review was a tool I discovered and made mandatory.

A few years later, everyone converged on GitHub, PRs, and code review. What we were already doing now became the default.

Many, many years layer, I work with a 100% remote team that is mostly experienced and 75% or more of our work is writing code that looks like code we've already written. Most code review is low value. Yes, we do catch issues in review, especially with newer hires, but it's not obviously worth the delay of a review cycle.

Our current policy is to trust the author to opt-in for review. So far, this approach works, but I doubt it will scale.

My point? We have a lot of posts about code review and related tools and not enough about whether to review and how to make reviews useful.

benrutter · 3 days ago

Interesting take! Personally I'd never throw out code review, for a couple reasons.

1. It's easy to optimise for talented, motivated people in your team. You obviously want this, and it should be the standard, but you also want it to be the case that somebody who doesn't care about their work can't trash the codebase.

2. I find even people just leaving 'lgtm' style reviews for simple things, does a lot to make sure folks keep up with changes. Even if there's nothing caught, you still want to make sure there aren't changes that only one person knows about. That's how you wind up with stuff like, the same utility functions written 10 times.

benrutter commented on Code review can be better tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025... · Posted by u/sealeck

Areibman · 3 days ago

The biggest grip I have with Github is the app is painfully slow. And by slow, I mean browser tab might freeze level slow.

Shockingly, the best code review tool I've ever used was Azure DevOps.

benrutter · 3 days ago

What did you like so much about DevOps?

I use it every day and don't have any issues with the review system, but to me it's very similar to github. If anything, I miss being able to suggest changes and have people click a button to integrate them as commits.

benrutter commented on Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation databricks.com/company/ne... · Posted by u/djhu9

djrj477dhsnv · 4 days ago

What exactly is a "data platform"?

We have a large postgres server running on a dedicated server that handles millions of users, billions of record updates and inserts per day, and when I want to run an analysis I just open up psql. I wrote some dashboards and alerting in python that took a few hours to spin up. If we ever ran into load issues, we'd just set up some basic replication. It's all very simple and can easily scale further.

benrutter · 4 days ago

Sounds like you have the benefit of a nicely designed server and good practices. A lot of companies aren't the same.

Imagine you're a big company with loads of teams/departments multiple different types of SQL servers for data reporting, plus some parquet datalakes, and hey, just for fun why not a bunch of csvs.

Getting data from all these locations becomes a full time job, so at some point someone wants some tool/ui that lets data analysts log into a single thing, and get the experience that you currently have with one postgres server.

I think it's not a problem of scale in the CS sense, more the business sense where big organisations become complex and disorganised and need abstractions on top to make them workable.

benrutter commented on The End of Handwriting wired.com/story/the-end-o... · Posted by u/beardyw

tenuousemphasis · 4 days ago

Try writing right to left!

benrutter · 4 days ago

This is the kind of solution I'm looking for!

Should I:

- Write in mirror image form?

- Learn to predict my line length so I can write right to left, but have the text read left to right?

- Learn arabic or herbrew?

I'm leaning towards all three personally.

benrutter commented on Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation databricks.com/company/ne... · Posted by u/djhu9

retinaros · 4 days ago

I always struggled to understand how do you make a company adopt a platform like databricks to « manage data » isnt managing data a minefield with plenty of open source pieces of software that serve different purposes ? who is the typical databricks customer?

benrutter · 4 days ago

I think that's the main offering of databricks- you get a "data platforn in a box" and navigating the forest of piecemeal solutions is replaced with telling your data science and analytics teams to "use databricks".

It's easy to look on knowing lots about data tools and say "this could be better done with open source tools for a fraction of the cost", but if you're not a big tech company, hiring a team to manage your data platform for 5 analysts is probably a lot more expensive than just buying databricks.

benrutter commented on Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation databricks.com/company/ne... · Posted by u/djhu9

ed_elliott_asc · 4 days ago

I can’t help feeling it is the first major misstep from databricks , they are raising the money for their hosted Postgres and ai platform.

Ai is not far away from dropping to the “trough of disillusionment” and I can’t see why databricks even needs Postgres.

Hopefully I’m wrong as I’m a big fan of databricks.

benrutter · 4 days ago

Definitely seem like bad investments from my perspective on databricks.

Databricks is great at offering a "distributed spark/kubernetes in a box" platform. But its AI integration is one of the least helpful I've experienced. It's very interuptive to a workflow, and very rarely offers genuinely useful help. Most users I've seen turn it off, something databricks must be aware of because they require admins permission for users to opt out of AI.

I don't mean to rant, there's lots that is useful in databricks, but it doesn't seem like this funding round is targeting any of that.

benrutter commented on Sky Calendar abramsplanetarium.org/Sky... · Posted by u/NaOH

Suquolaque · 4 days ago

I use this one, it's free and you can filter event type and location: https://in-the-sky.org/newscalyear.php

benrutter · 4 days ago

This looks perfect! Thanks!!

benrutter commented on The End of Handwriting wired.com/story/the-end-o... · Posted by u/beardyw

elros · 4 days ago

PSA for people with "bad cursive handwriting" but who would like to improve it: Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example).

Different writing systems evolved alongside different utensils. Cursive evolved to be written with a quill or a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens are an amazing invention and they have their place, but they optimize for price and practicality, not necessarily for an æsthetically pleasing legible outcome. People say they have "bad handwriting" but their setup is a Bic pen on a thin sheet of paper on top of a hard surface: well, everyone's handwriting is bad in this setup.

In France, back when I went to school, not sure now, though I hope it hasn't changed, as a child, you'd only be allowed to use fountain pens. Kids learning to write have constantly stained hands while they learn to use it properly, almost as a rite of passage. I'm very thankful to have learned it like that.

benrutter · 4 days ago

Any tips for lefties? I find in very difficult to avoid complete smudgification of everything I write with a fountain pen, since it takes so much longer for the ink to dry.

benrutter commented on Left to Right Programming graic.net/p/left-to-right... · Posted by u/graic

pjmlp · 6 days ago

Kusto, the Azure query language for data analysis uses that form with piping as well.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/kusto/query/?view=microsof...

Also the LINQ approach in .NET.

I do agree, that is about time that SQL could have a variant starting with FROM, and it shouldn't be that hard to support that, it feels like unwillingness to improve the experience.

benrutter · 5 days ago

Kusto is so much vetter than it has any right to be! Normally I'd run a mile at a cloud provider specific programming language that can't ve used elsewhere, but it really is quite nice! (there are some wierd quirks, but a tonne less than I'd have thought)