denis256 notes and projects

Previous: Part II, Chapter 9 - The Face Without Pain or Fear

This is the chapter where you finally get the answer. After hundreds of pages of “Who is John Galt?” thrown around like a curse, a prayer, and a surrender all at once, Rand delivers the reveal. She does it in the most unexpected way possible.

The Tramp on the Train

Dagny is on a train heading west, exhausted, watching the world crumble outside her window. The lights of small towns flash by, factories and shops with their names painted on walls. Some still alive, most fading. She is watching civilization die in slow motion and she knows it.

Previous: AWS Auxiliary Services

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 4 covers data ingestion and transformation. This is Part 1, focused on ingestion. Getting data into AWS is the first step of any analytics pipeline. Sounds simple, but the number of services and patterns you need to know is big.

Data Ingestion Overview

Data ingestion is the process of importing data from various sources into AWS storage and processing systems. The book breaks it into three patterns:

Previous: Part II, Chapter 8 - By Our Love

One of the best chapters in the entire book. I will say it right away. It starts slow, builds tension across three completely different emotional registers, and ends on the kind of cliffhanger that makes you flip to the next chapter at 2 AM. Rand wrote a genuine, pulse-racing thriller scene here. Did not expect that from a 1,000-page philosophy novel.

Previous: AWS Analytics Services

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 3 Part 1 covered the core analytics services: Kinesis, Glue, Redshift, Athena, and friends. Those services don’t exist in a vacuum though. They need compute to run on, databases to pull data from, storage to land results, networking to keep things secure, and monitoring to know when something breaks.

Previous: Part II, Chapter 7 - The Moratorium on Brains

This chapter has one of the most haunting sequences in the entire book. If you have ever worked in any system where competent people got stripped out one by one and replaced with yes-men, you will recognize every single step of what happens here. Starts slow. Then it becomes unstoppable.

Dagny in the Woods

Dagny is hiding from the world. She is in her family’s old cabin in the Berkshires, alone, trying to heal. She quit the railroad. She told herself she needs rest, needs to learn to live without Taggart Transcontinental, needs to get the pain out of the way.