I’ve had my Tesla Model 3 for almost a year now and I purchased it with the Full Self-Driving (FSD) optional extra. At the time, this optional extra provided some self-driving features, but the car was far from driving me from A to B without human intervention. What I essentially bought was the promise of FSD in the future.

I, along with many others, believe that promise will soon be delivered and not just because Elon said so.

The new FSD re-write will soon begin its beta release. A few “safe” drivers who are part of Tesla’s Early Access Program will be getting this “quantum leap” re-write next week. …

Data science has been a hot topic in the data space for a number of years now but starting in 2019, data scientist salaries have shrunk 1.2% year-on-year, mainly due to oversaturation in the market.

It has become too popular. The tools and techniques have been abstracted enough now that non-data-scientists can get a good chunk of the job done without a heavy data science background.

Conversely, “Data Engineer” remains the top tech job, with an 88.3% increase in postings over the past twelve months (again, reported in 2019). …

Elasticsearch has long been used for a wide variety of real-time analytics use cases, including log storage and analysis and search applications. The reason it’s so popular is because of how it indexes data so it’s efficient for search. However, this comes with a cost in that joining documents is less efficient.

There are ways to build relationships in Elasticsearch documents, most common are: nested objects, parent-child joins, and application side joins. Each of these has different use cases and drawbacks versus the natural SQL joining approach that is provided by technologies like Rockset.

In this post, I’ll talk through a common Elasticsearch use case, walk through how you could implement it with application-side joins in Elasticsearch, and then show how the same functionality is provided in Rockset. …

Data Engineering is one of the fastest-growing job roles and this should be no surprise. Data Science is in high demand and businesses have quickly found that having engineers to aid the scientists provides faster results.

The data footprint of many organisations these days is huge. Data is being absorbed from many different sources in a myriad of formats. This dirty data wreaks havoc for analysts and data scientists whose core role is to extract models and insights.

This is why data engineer job roles are booming as they can help reduce this burden. …

We’re growing more and more conscious of how we are being exploited through social media and advertisements that use your data to increase their bottom line.

It’s no surprise then that the market share for VPN’s (Virtual Private Networks) is forecast to grow almost three times in the next 6 years from $25 billion to $70 billion. As people grow more conscious of their data footprint, solutions to prevent “big brother” from spying on their every move will only become more popular.

So what is it that companies are doing that we should be so scared of? Is there any positive side to all of this data collection or is it only to fatten the pockets of those exploiting us? …

With deliveries in the States poised for late 2021 and reservations being possible here in the UK too, I was curious whether the dimensions of the Cybertruck would be practical in day to day life here in the UK.

As you may be aware, here in the UK our roads tend to be narrower especially within city centres and the number of people with trucks is significantly lower than in the US.

So how well will Cybertruck do here in the UK given our lack of thirst for trucks and our narrower streets?

Driving A Cybertruck

Most roads in the UK are plenty wide enough for the Cybertruck in everyday use. The size of the car was talked about a lot when the car was first announced, especially with it coming to Europe. Here in the UK most of our roads are wide enough, although some country lanes can get quite narrow. Considering many of these country lanes lead to farms with tractors using these roads, it’s safe to say the Cybertruck should be fine. …

And no, I didn’t learn to speed read.

Reading is fantastic for the mind in many ways. It’s been scientifically proven to increase intelligence and empathy and help fight Alzheimer's disease. You can read to help wind down after a stressful day and you’ll probably find you sleep much better for it.

The one problem I’ve always had with reading is finding time to read more. I read every night to settle my brain and induce sleep but find that it never feels “enough”.

Well in 2020 I found a way to increase my throughput without compromising on reading quality. This isn’t a post about a reading “life-hack” that will allow you to speed read 100 pages in 10 minutes. …

Tesla’s Full Self Driving (FSD) Beta has been out for over a month now and has been tested by a small number of “tesla certified safe” drivers before gradually being added to a few more drivers.

This post will recap what we’ve seen so far, especially what has improved in the most recent updates. We’ll also look into what happens next and when we’re likely to see a more widespread rollout within the US and elsewhere too.

How is the FSD Beta Doing?

Before being released, all we really had to go on was the current public state of Autopilot and the “FSD” features that already existed. Naturally, this meant that there were a whole bunch of concerns about how it would deal with a lot of everyday scenarios. …