Damon Cortesi
LightNews LightNews
banner
dacort.velocipig.com
Damon Cortesi
@dacort.velocipig.com
270 followers 320 following 1.2K posts
Trapped in a Python container. Building Spark on K8s Infra. Founder and CTO expat.

Seattle // In the woods

https://dacort.xyz
Posts Replies Media Videos
dacort.velocipig.com
I don't always build RAG pipelines, but when I do I use "campfire" chats from 2012 as my dataset.
A screenshot of a terminal showing the followin gtext: 📸 Processing: dropbox:///simply measured/engineering/backup/campfire/campfire/simplymeasured/hangout/2012/11/01/uploads/3718553/scott-campbell-louis-vuitton-tattoo.jpg ✅ Qdrant client initialized: ./data/qdrant ✓ OCR: (211,417),(714,837)... ✓ Description: A young man with a serious expression shows off a unique neck tattoo featuring the Louis Vuitton logo in a geometric pattern. ✓ Embedding: 512d vector stored
November 27, 2025 at 11:54 PM
dacort.velocipig.com
A tweet from an alleged Anthropic engineer stating: I believe this new model in Claude Code is a glimpse of the future we're hurtling towards, maybe as soon as the first half of next year: software engineering is done. Soon, we won't bother to check generated code, for the same reasons we don't check compiler output.
November 27, 2025 at 12:21 AM
dacort.velocipig.com
Kids these days...
A list of GitHub issues. The top one is titled "bruh", below that is another that says "why now the game said game log", and another entry that just says "hi".
November 26, 2025 at 10:19 PM
dacort.velocipig.com
I realize that some of the talks are not titled with specific products ( like "Optimizing Apache Spark workloads" )..but still.

Where even is Lake Formation?!
A summary of the different talks in the referenced blog post: Highlights by Product Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio (Most sessions - 22) - New unified platform for data & AI - Visual data pipeline builder - SageMaker Catalog for governance & discovery - Agentic AI and natural language development Amazon Redshift (11 sessions) - Multi-warehouse architecture scaling - AI-driven Serverless scaling - Materialized views optimization - Data sharing and monetization Amazon QuickSight / Quick Suite (10 sessions) - AI-powered BI with conversational AI - Agentic AI chat experiences - Embedded analytics for revenue Amazon OpenSearch Service (9 sessions) - Vector search and hybrid search - Intelligent observability - Low-cost logging solutions - MCP integration for AI-powered search Streaming (Kafka/Flink/Kinesis) (10 sessions) - Batch to real-time migration - Apache Flink stream processing - Event-driven architectures - Kinesis deep dives Apache Iceberg / Lakehouse (8 sessions) - Open lakehouse architectures - S3 Tables for Iceberg - Data interoperability - Streaming ingestion to Iceberg
November 25, 2025 at 10:58 PM
dacort.velocipig.com
Heat pump vs. fireplace...fight!
A temperature chart over the past 24 hours. On the left-side, the chart is sawtooth-shaped but on the right-hand side it's a smooth slope upwards.
November 25, 2025 at 10:12 PM
dacort.velocipig.com
Literally just ran into this. An entire page of results, only 1 of which was an actual organic result. 🫠

And its even worse than in the picture – the result was almost 2 scrolls below the fold and there were *more* sponsored results below it!

Source: www.instagram.com/p/DDbmv-yNij...
An image depicting a drawing of side by side Google search results. The title says "Googling stuff..." With the left side saying "... Then" Then a drop down with/"search results:" and "the thing you want" in a yellow box On the right it says "... Now" with a drop down that features a VERY long list of things starting with "ai taking a wild stab at it with some blatant misinformation", 4 iterations of "sponsored result" a box featuring "people also ask", a sub box saying view products with images and what is likely the top of the yellow box that would Contain "the thing you want"
November 25, 2025 at 7:03 PM
dacort.velocipig.com
eero.com in Vivaldi - the page is blank with just the text: "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading eero.com (see the browser console for more information)." Below is the developer console with many "Uncaught errors" in the console log.
November 19, 2025 at 7:07 AM
dacort.velocipig.com
Ironically their website doesn't work for me in Vivaldi, probably because of the MASSIVE BLACK FRIDAY DROPDOWN YO.
A screenshot of eero.com in Safari showing half the page blocked out with a pop-up advertising black friday deals.
November 19, 2025 at 7:06 AM
dacort.velocipig.com
What, you all don't use AI to generate multiple different spinning rainbow emoji?
A file listing including multiple different python scripts and gif files titled things like "make_rainbow_emoji.py", "make_spinning_rainbow_emoji.py", and "make_bobbing_rainbow_emoji.py". Several corresponding gifs also are there.
November 19, 2025 at 4:29 AM
dacort.velocipig.com
I'm a lean, mean, grafana machine.
A grafana chart showing a line chart percentages on the Y axis ranging from o to 120%. The chart is titled "Effective Capacity (% of Guaranteed)". A purple time series exceeds up above 120% and out-of-view of the Y-Axis and then back down.
November 18, 2025 at 10:25 PM
dacort.velocipig.com
Back in Seattle, we are. 😂
A view out the plane window, with only grey clouds in sight. Rain streaks across the window. The planes engine and wing is in the background.
November 14, 2025 at 7:33 PM
dacort.velocipig.com
Dunno why that pic is so ... dusty?
A view of the footlands of the craggy rocky mountains stretching away into the distance. The peaks are dusted with snow and the sky is crystal blue.
November 14, 2025 at 5:12 PM
dacort.velocipig.com
Absolutely beautiful day to cross the Rockies. 🤩
A view of the footlands of the craggy rocky mountains stretching away into the distance. The peaks are dusted with snow and the sky is crystal blue.
November 14, 2025 at 5:09 PM
dacort.velocipig.com
Peace out KubeCon. 👋 🛫
A view of an empty runway prior to takeoff.
November 14, 2025 at 2:21 PM
dacort.velocipig.com
For all the #KubeCon folks still in town, found a great place to eat tonight!
A boarded up, dilapidated house with a sign hanging over it that says “Haunted Midtown”. The sign is a garbage bag with white tape as the letters.
November 13, 2025 at 9:24 PM
dacort.velocipig.com
The most amazing thing I saw at #KubeCon today? A live demo using k9s v0.28(!!). That was right before my favorite release of all time...
A screenshot of release v0.30.0 showing the k9s dog logo, with a Santa hat over one ear. The release is from December 23, 2023.
November 11, 2025 at 3:03 AM
dacort.velocipig.com
Get those engines warmed up. #Seahawks
The Cardinals jet sitting on the runway.
November 10, 2025 at 12:22 AM
dacort.velocipig.com
#KubeCon y’all got your winter gear ready??
A weather report for the upcoming week showing a low of 25° F (-3.8C) on Tuesday.
November 7, 2025 at 6:44 AM
dacort.velocipig.com
I would first have to through Chicago (fine), then Washington DC (oh), then down to Atlanta.

If I had nothing to do, it'd probably be pretty fun. Wasn't there a "Hackers on a Train" conference once?
A map of the Amtrack Network showing the limited number of cross-country routes. Everything goes through Chicago as well.
November 6, 2025 at 6:44 AM
dacort.velocipig.com
If I wanted to take a train to KubeCon and arrive by Monday, I'd have to leave .... tomorrow.
A brief itinerary of a train from Seattle to Atlanta leaving Thu, Nov 6 and arriving 8:43am on Mon, Nov 10. Duration: 84h 48m
November 6, 2025 at 6:41 AM
dacort.velocipig.com
Quick sneak peak of some of the Spark on k8s stuff I'll be talking about at KubeCon next week.
A diagram showing a Spark Log Server and Reverse Proxy service that services UI, logs, and SHS (Spark History Server) endpoints and the underlying infrastructure.
November 4, 2025 at 8:22 PM
dacort.velocipig.com
Spooky.
A weather radar image showing a huge swatch of rain approaching the Pacific Northwest stretching from Canada to the tip of California.
October 31, 2025 at 2:24 PM
dacort.velocipig.com
Why does the Vantage API not return any data for so many EC2 products? 🫠
A screenshot of a summary from Claude Code: I found 605 AWS EC2 products with empty details hashes. Some notable patterns in the results: - High-memory instances: u-series (u-12tb1, u-6tb1, u-9tb1, u-24tb1, etc.) - Newer generation instances: m6i, c6i, r6i, c7i, r7i, m7i, m8g, c8g, r8g series - GPU instances: g4ad, g5, g6, gr6 series - Specialized instances: vt1 (video transcoding), dl1/dl2q (deep learning), inf2 (inference), trn1/trn2 (training) - Storage-optimized: i4g, i7i, i8g, is4gen series
October 30, 2025 at 6:06 PM
dacort.velocipig.com
The beginning of a bad idea…
A screenshot of me asking ChatGPT “how steep a grade can a 4wd truck comfortably drive up in the woods”
October 20, 2025 at 6:00 PM
dacort.velocipig.com
Mr. McMahon reaction Meme showing a progression from regular temperatures to above average precipitation to a zoomed "above" diagram to a winter storm weather alert for this Sunday.
October 10, 2025 at 10:17 PM