select links from 2025-11-22
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 SQL queries once, but I fear the man who has practiced one SQL query 10,000 times.
Hello friends! I love writing this blog but I have two thoughts to share.
First, if you found, wrote or created something cool, let me know – I would love to highlight it here. Second, while the topics I cover are near and dear to my heart, I feel like I end up stowing them away here and don’t return to them. I should revisit these blog posts to keep refining the topics I cover and ultimately apply them in practice. On that accord, this week’s blog post on mastery is VERY relevant! Enjoy!
I want to see the claw
Vicki Boykis recently blogged I want to see the claw, I highly recommend reading it as well as everything else she had written before. My favourite excerpt is the following:
I’m currently running hiring rounds and good god the difference between a complacent candidate and one who strives to achieve excellence is striking. I don’t think it’s about pure experience though but about continuous improvement. As an employee, you will inevitably develop some level of mastery but I think the key is seeking and extracting knowledge that generalises beyond your current workplace.
At some point I was afraid I wasn’t writing good code or applying best practices and maybe I should be looking for a new job just to prove myself I’m good at my craft. Now that I’m a manager my fear is whether the environment I create enables applying best practices or achieving mastery. Afterall, I wouldn’t be surprised if the question of whether “if I were to quit today, would my experience be applicable elsewhere?” looms on everyone’s mind from time to time.
As an aside, this blog post “Quality Assurance without the spreadsheets” by Rhian Davies is a great suggestion on how to achieve quality at work - do QA where the work happens! If you work in code repo, put your QA list there. Heck, use an LLM if you have to. It’s a great blog post.
What’s worse is that noone, absolutely noone, wants you to get better. Everyone – that includes your workplace, your family and friends, your phone – wants to pull your attention towards them and their needs. If you have someone encouraging you to be better, you’re a VERY lucky person.
Did you know…
…dbplyr understands SQL in dplyr verbs?
I sure didn’t!
More about dbplyr: https://dbplyr.tidyverse.org/articles/translation-function.html
…binom.confint supports 12 ways to calculate a confidence interval?
I sure didn’t!
…what is the optimal way of dicing an onion?!
I kind of did but you probably didn’t! The Dicing an ONION the Mathematically Optimal Way by Andrew Aquino blog post is AMAZING.
…Pope Leo threw a rave???
Other links
Blog post: Why Does Development Slow? by Kent Beck
Blog post: The fifth anniversary of a viral histogram