quinn VS Task

We're brainstorming functions to make PySpark easier, see this issue: https://github.com/MrPowers/quinn/issues/83

Adding some README documentation to the README should be quite straightforward. Here's a function that needs to be documented: https://github.com/MrPowers/quinn/issues/52 .

quinn is a library with PySpark helper functions. I need to work through all the open issues / PRs and bump all versions. I should do another release. This library gets around 600,000 monthly downloads.

Pandas syntax is far inferior to regular PySpark in my opinion. Goes to show how much data analysts value a syntax that they're already familiar with. Pandas syntax makes it harder to reason about queries, abstract DataFrame transformations, etc. I've authored some popular PySpark libraries like quinn and chispa and am not excited to add Pandas syntax support, haha.

Here's how I added a create_df method to the SparkSession class: https://github.com/MrPowers/quinn/blob/main/quinn/extensions/spark_session_ext.py

They spent a lot of effort improving the catalyst engine under the hood too and making it easier to extend and improve it in the future. Making it easy to add your own native code to Spark itself. Shameless plug of a blog post I wrote on this subject which basically reiterates what Matthew Powers, author of Spark Daria and quinn, wrote here.

I built daria (https://github.com/MrPowers/spark-daria) to make it easier to write Spark and spark-fast-tests (https://github.com/MrPowers/spark-fast-tests) to provide a good testing workflow.

quinn (https://github.com/MrPowers/quinn) and chispa (https://github.com/MrPowers/chispa) are the PySpark equivalents.

Built bebe (https://github.com/MrPowers/bebe) to expose the Spark Catalyst expressions that aren't exposed to the Scala / Python APIs.

Also build spark-sbt.g8 to create a Spark project with a single command: https://github.com/MrPowers/spark-sbt.g8

I've built popular PySpark (quinn, chispa) and Scala Spark (spark-daria, spark-fast-tests) libraries.

So many tools in this space! This one looks a little bit like go-task, but it seems maybe better for production workflows because if timeout support, while go-task seems more aimed to command line work/makefile replacement.

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https://github.com/go-task/task

View on GitHub

A similar tool is `task` https://taskfile.dev/ . It is quite capable and also a single executable. I've grown to quite like it.

check out tasks - a bit of a learning curve but arguably more powerful imo

That's when I came across taskfile.dev. Task is an automation tool designed to be more accessible than other options, such as GNU Make.

Full disclosure, I did not review Conda or Hatch fully. Not that there is anything explicitly wrong with either of them. Conda is too specific to the scientific community for my general taste. Hatch seems to go well with Conda and also uses the PyProject manifest as well. It's nice that it gives you several built in tools, similar to commit hooks, but I tend to like to roll my own via a Taskfile and run them with Poetry.

Taskfile is a tool for streamlining repetitive development tasks. It helps automate activities like building, testing, and deploying applications. Unlike Makefile, Taskfile uses YAML for configuration, making it more readable and user-friendly.

9. We test everything with another promotion which runs make targets which build docker containers to run python scripts (pytest)

This is also built by a complicated web of wildcarded makefile targets, which need to be interoperable and support a few if/else cases for specific components.

My plan is to migrate all of this to something simpler and more straightforward, or at least more maintainable, which is honestly probably going to turn into taskfile[0] instead of makefiles, and then simple python scripts for the glue that ties everything together or does more complex logic.

My hope is that it can be more straightforward and easier to maintain, with more component-ized logic, but realistically every step in that labyrinthine build process (and that's just the open-source version!) came from a decision made by a very talented team of engineers who know far more about the process and the product than I do. At this point I'm wondering if it would make 'more sense' to replace it with a giant python script of some kind and get access to all the logic we need all at once (it would not).

[0] https://taskfile.dev/

task - a task runner and a replacement for make