six2seven

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.

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.

Although this article [1] compares Airflow to Prefect it outlines pretty interestingly limitations of Airflow.

I would be also curious to hear more about alternative and mature open-source solutions to Airflow.

[1] https://medium.com/the-prefect-blog/why-not-airflow-4cfa4232...

  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.

Also wanted to write about Phabricator / Phacility as it looks really neat.

Does anyone have a first hand experience working with it comparing to standard Atlassian stack?

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.

[0] https://superset.apache.org [1] https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/

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.

Good luck and, really, try to have fun!

The other big challenge I never resolved was how you'd account for e.g. using 1/4 cup of flour out of a bigger volume. Or taken to its extreme, cooking oil. How do you know how much your 'splash' is? You can't predict the remaining volume without a lot of fiddling to measure it and that defeats the purpose.

Definitely. Or, even, just taking some snacks to another room, and later placing it back to an 'intelligent' cupboard, let's say. In extreme cases, one may need be under a constant tracking at home.

But, simplifying, another option may be to use an improved voice assistant when cooking. One would need then to interact with the VA to note and confirm the stuff used. Improved VA, in essence, would try to 'understand' the activities and interact, instead of being a passive one (as most of currently are), that one needs to say commands. This would require adding it access to camera and maybe other sensors available at 'smart' home. Definitely a lot of interesting and challenging problems to tackle not forgetting too about the user privacy part.

This is exactly what I needed and was thinking about building a similar app. But to be really useful and automated, there's a bit long way I'm afraid. The biggest deal breaker is the time spend for the data entry and updates, leaving a pen-and-paper / notes solution still the most easy to use and just visiting local groceries and shops. I was collecting receipts and playing a bit with scanning of these, but the amount of noise in the data and inconsistencies between shops were a bit pushing away (unless you want to dedicate time cleaning the data and training own tailored information extraction models).

One of the options to solve the data entry could be: - good quality automatic scanning of receipts (not only individual barcodes) from shops using OCR possibly supported with image recognition for double-checking (can happen that products will be mis-labelled or without quantities, etc) - when ordering on-line, the receipt should be available, so should be also much easier Yet, not always one will have a meaningful receipt available...

Solved the data entry and being able to predict own's supply needs would be also great to have a up-to date management of the inventory. Here are even more challenges on the tracking of the available goods at home, where these are and how many items (and in what state, expiration date, etc) would require most probably implementing different solutions from IoT (connected cameras, sensors, etc.).

Then, having a connected home with own groceries supplies under control, one can then automate further the shopping process with feeding-back the information about own's demand to on-line groceries one is subscribed to. This can enable customer subscription plans, and for retailer keeping a possible continuous flow of goods. This could be really really useful especially for upcoming months, when it seems like we are expected to spend a bit more time at home rather than usual, hopefully not fighting in the local shops for the last rolls of the new white paper gold.

As an alternative, there's an open-source OpenDistro for ElasticSearch [1] that offers X-Pack-like security with some other X-Pack-like features. Although it is not officially supported by elastic.co, but it's a pretty good alternative and is supported by Netflix, Amazon, et all. Worth giving a try.

[1] https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/

You see, around ~10 years ago I could just buy online a (even non-genuine) refill kit and just refill the ink in the cartridges by myself. And I could use the printer whenever I wanted. If I run out of the ink, I would just buy the ink refill set which costed around 5-6€. Think that such kit could be re-used to fill multiple carriages and last many months. If I did not use the printer for 2 months, I would not need to pay any fee for just having a printer in idle state. I "owned" the printer.

Nowadays, you seem not to even "own" the printer nor the cartridges. Everything becomes a service where you should be in the loop continuously paying for it. And we are consciously supporting such economy.

That's a really good question! I've been using for quite some time Tika as the Swiss-army knife for text extraction.

They don't seem to be even using Tika behind the hood as any of the bundled tools. Perhaps anyone has some comparisons?

You might be interested in Software Craftsmanship [0] manifesto. There are many communities and initiatives around the world gathering folks with the interest in producing high-quality software. From the few of the folks I have been working with that are involved in SC, I can definitely recommend the movement and so I'm also exploring options in joining some local meet-ups and/or events.

[0] http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/

Try to release this tension a bit, stay with the team, adapt, work hard and observe. You have now perspective after only one month. Revalidate it after 3 and then after 6 mo. And don't forget to not stop improving and adjusting.

Your story reminds me a bit of mine. I joined at some point a very skilled, but small team of engineers working on a product from machine vision area. Those chaps were brilliant engineers, many with significant achievements in academic / coding championships. They were truly passionate on what they were doing and were really good at it. And I felt that I was 'just another regular dev' who cannot even compare with most of them, but who also liked coding and the problems domain.

After first month working there I was quite stressed, as was I constantly seeing the gap in my skillset, but I tried hard to manage. After 3 months, I was slowly 'getting there', working on the full stack, but still had the impression of vastly underperforming vs the rest of the team. After 6 months I finally got into the rhythm and started being given more senior and responsible tasks. It took me a while, but it was really worth it.

Although today I am working in another place (and country), but, really, working with that skilled team was one of the most productive and self-improving times in my career (and I still kind of miss these times and the team).