Introduction
As the fall winds down and everyone starts thinking about turkey, travel, and a little time off, we decided to ask our engineering team a simple question:
“What’s one tool or technology you’re thankful for this year?”
Not the fanciest tool. Not the trendiest. Simply the one thing that genuinely made their work easier, faster, or less painful. Here’s what they shared.
What Our Engineers Are Thankful For
AWS Batch - Submitted by Jessie Edge
"I am thankful for Batch! It automatically handles scaling, scheduling, and running our national modeling jobs so we can focus on writing code and analyzing outputs instead of managing servers!"
Why it matters:
Batch keeps our compute-heavy workloads running smoothly without babysitting infrastructure.
Firefox Containers - Submitted by Raman Kadariya
"I am thankful for Firefox Containers. They help keep parts of my online activity (especially, AWS accounts for different clients) separated into color-coded tabs. Cookies are also separated by container. We can also group the tabs in each of these containers separately, which helps me be more organized and switch between tasks more easily."
Why it matters:
A small browser feature, but genuinely useful for engineers juggling multiple client environments.
Docker Containers - Submitted by Jake Russ
"I am thankful for docker containers. These allow all of our analytics jobs to run on the identical software every single time and that eliminates a lot of frustration."
Why it matters:
Docker gives us reproducibility and stability: two things engineers are thankful for year-round.
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AWS Step Functions - Submitted by Shashank Muthuraj
"I’m thankful for Step Functions because it makes it easy to run many steps in the right order without a lot of extra code. It helps us see where things are in the process and fix issues faster when something goes wrong."
Why it matters:
Step Functions orchestrate complex workflows cleanly and visually, which helps with both debugging and collaboration.
Amazon S3 - Submitted by Daniel George:
"IAM thankful for S3! It's a simple storage solution that's easy to connect to via Python and R, and is a great way to transfer data both to and from partner organizations. We even trigger jobs when new data lands."
Why it matters:
S3 is a core piece of nearly every data pipeline we build: durable, scalable, and easy to automate.
GitHub - Submitted by Spencer Anderson
"I am thankful for GitHub. With not having much R experience prior to this role, GitHub was useful for me to gain a better understanding on how R is used and the syntax of it. It also gave me the opportunity to see how my teammates utilize R to achieve their tasks."
Why it matters:
GitHub doubles as both a collaboration platform and a learning tool, giving new engineers a clear window into patterns, workflows, and real code they can build from.
Auto Tab Discard (Firefox extension) - Submitted by Michael Tseng
"I'm thankful for auto tab discard because it allows me to keep all my Firefox tabs up without consuming all of my system memory. It allows me to quickly reload tabs that I need and enables me to multitask more efficiently"
Why it matters:
We all know the pain of 47 open tabs during a long debugging session. This one hits home.
boto3 - Submitted by Brett Smith
"I am thankful for boto3. It allows an easy interface to use AWS services in Python. Without it it would be incredibly more difficult to use AWS services in Python."
Why it matters:
boto3 is the backbone of almost everything programmatic we do with AWS.
Parquet Files - Submitted by Thomas Piechowiak
“They preserve data types, which keeps data integrity intact, and the simple partitioning framework makes fast queries easy.”
Why it matters:
Parquet is a backbone format across our data platforms: compact, columnar, and perfect for high-performance analytics.
Terraform - Submitted by Tyler Sanders
"I am most thankful for Terraform - an open source tool we use to create what the industry calls 'Infrastructure as Code'. We use Terraform Modules to automate deployments of entire data applications on AWS that can the easily be deployed, updated, and enhanced in a version-controlled and consistent manner for our clients. Terraform is definitely one of our Red Oak super powers"
Why it matters:
Terraform keeps our cloud environments repeatable, trackable, and easy to evolve.
Happy Thanksgiving!
It’s always interesting to see what people rely on day to day. Some of these tools are big, foundational pieces of our cloud architecture. Others are small quality-of-life helpers that make an engineer’s day just a little smoother.
Either way, they all play a part in helping us build solid, reliable systems for our clients. We hope you enjoy a restful and well-deserved Thanksgiving.
