denis256 notes and projects

Previous: Part III, Chapter 4 - Anti-Life

“Their Brothers’ Keepers” – the irony of that title should hit you like a truck. Every person in this book who claims to be their brother’s keeper is actively destroying their brother. Every single one. The title is not describing a moral principle. It is describing a murder weapon.

Everything Is Breaking

A copper wire breaks in California. Just one wire. No copper to replace it because the storekeeper sold their stock weeks ago to shady dealers connected to Cuffy Meigs. Nobody reports it. Nobody acts. Everyone too afraid of retaliation to do their job.

Previous: Part III, Chapter 3 - Anti-Greed

Rand finally drops the mask on her villains in this chapter. Not just on what they do, but on what they actually want. What they want is the most disturbing thing in the entire book.

James Taggart, Unmasked

Jim Taggart is wandering through New York after a day of backroom deals. He has been scheming to nationalize d’Anconia Copper. Setting up shady corporations with Orren Boyle to loot South American industries. By any measure, a successful day for him. He should be celebrating.

Previous: Data Modeling

Book: AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate Study Guide Authors: Sakti Mishra, Dylan Qu, Anusha Challa Publisher: O’Reilly Media ISBN: 978-1-098-17007-3

Chapter 6 is titled “Data Operations and Support” and it’s a big one. This post covers the first part: analytics operations. QuickSight for BI dashboards, Athena for SQL on S3, Redshift for heavy SQL analytics, and notebooks for interactive data exploration. These are the tools you use after you’ve built your pipelines and stored your data. Now you actually look at it.

Previous: Data Stores and Lifecycle

Book: AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate Study Guide Authors: Sakti Mishra, Dylan Qu, Anusha Challa Publisher: O’Reilly Media ISBN: 978-1-098-17007-3

Data modeling is one of those topics that sounds academic until you get it wrong in production. Then it becomes very real, very fast. This section of Chapter 5 covers data modeling strategies for three different AWS services: Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB, and S3 data lakes. Each has its own rules, trade-offs, and gotchas.

Previous: Part III, Chapter 2 - The Utopia of Greed

The title “Anti-Greed” is doing heavy lifting. Everything in this chapter is sold under the banner of fighting greed. Project X, the Railroad Unification Plan, the blackmail, the public speeches. Every destructive act gets wrapped in selflessness. The people who benefit are the greediest ones of all.

Project X and Dr. Stadler’s Surrender

Dr. Robert Stadler gets dragged to Iowa for a mysterious demonstration. Summoned by Dr. Ferris, given no explanation, just official orders wrapped in demands for “loyalty” and “cooperation.” If you have ever been invited to a mandatory all-hands meeting where leadership announces something terrible and wants you smiling in the audience, you know this feeling.