I recently tried to sign up for the Microsoft Partner Network and the entire experience was grueling and excruciating from start to finish. I wasted two days on it and never managed to sign up.
Before Claude Code, out of the alternatives you mentioned, I'd only tried Windsurf. I find Claude Code to be roughly comparable to Windsurf in terms of capabilities, but I can use it from my terminal. I'm much more at home in a terminal than I am in VSCode (which Windsurf is a fork of).
Doing row-by-row inserts into DuckDB is really slow. Accumulating rows in an in-memory data structure and periodically batching them into something like an in-memory Arrow table, and then reading the Arrow table into DuckDB, is fast and has been tenable for my own use cases.
I competed against IBM for many contracts over many years as an engineer at a small startup. The experience left me with zero respect for IBM. On occasions when a customer did choose IBM over us for a project, I would genuinely feel bad for the customer.
IBM is all smoke and mirrors; sales, marketing, and predatory business practices once they get their claws in you. Very little deep technical competence at that company.
I think a big part of an engineering manager’s job is protecting their team’s focus, and advocating for their team to the rest of the organization. Programmers should be insulated by an engineering manager from the vicissitudes and stresses of corporate politics, and their work should be protected from management-level priority thrashing.
That the Russian government is characterizing these personnel as “peacekeepers” would be a fair statement, but to regurgitate that characterization in reporting on the matter seems rather less credible.