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A quick workaround to avoid people doing "SELECT *" on your tables (which I consider harmful, see stackoverflow) in BigQuery is the following:

1. Create a policy tag in the policy tags page. I create it under a new taxonomy "sql_rules", and call it "no_select_star"
2. Once created, in the policy tag taxonomy page I enable the "enforce access control" option. If you need users to bypass this policy (e.g. needs to run bigquery copy operations) you can add the "fine graded reader" role to the principal associated with the policy tag in the same page.
3. In the table you want to protect, add a dummy column (I call it "do_not_select_star") and assign it the policy tag
4. Done! From now on, SELECT * will throw an error.

For more info see Google Cloud docs

I recently had to set up a new Mac for programming. I took the opportunity to do what a colleague suggested me to do a long time ago: ditch gpg, gpg-agent, and such in favor of 1Password. This setup is much simpler and I believe more secure than what I was doing before.

These are some notes on the tradeoffs and best practices between On Demand pricing vs Editions pricing.

A small TIL about Python profiling.

SQL is an amazing language, it lets you declaratively say what you want, and the engine figures out for you the best way to return it to you. Or should I say, it figures out the best way to return it to you given the information it has and the capabilities of the engine itself.

In this post, we’ll discuss a performance optimization technique for BigQuery (also other advanced enough Enteprise Data Warehouses and databases support SEMI JOINS, but I'll focus on BigQuery since it's the one I use the most these days): using semi joins.

IN and EXISTS often produce the same result, but when negated and dealing with NULL values, they behave differently.

Today I learned how to run a webserver in Google Colab, without needing external services like ngrok. I'm using Dagster here as an example but any webserver should work.

Presentation I gave at the Dagster Community Meeting on the 21st of September, 2021 on how to use Dagster for machine learning purposes, with an explanation on why we chose that instead of Airflow.

By default, nix sets the epoch to be 1 (which corresponds to 1970-01-01), this causes some issues when building some Python packages. Since the zip might contain files from the nix store, those are dated 1970 breaking the installation of the python package.

I started learning Nix a few months ago, when it was introduced to the company I work for by some brilliant coworkers. I'm still learning and exploring this space, but I thought I'd share a few tips and resources that helped me start this journey to help newbies like me start working with this tool.

I spent the past few weeks fighting with Kubernetes Admission Controllers (also known as Mutating/Validating Webhooks).

Slides from the talk I gave at the Dublin Scala Users Group on the 23rd of January 2019