There is one line in almost every Spring Boot tutorial that runs flawlessly on your laptop and slowly corrupts your database in production: spring : jpa : hibernate : ddl-auto : update # works on your laptop, quietly rewrites prod With ddl-auto: update , Hibernate looks at your entities on every startup and alters the live schema to match them. No migration file. No version. No review. No rollback. Two developers add different fields, deploy in a different order, and now staging and production have quietly diverged — and the day one of those "updates" needs to drop a column, Hibernate will happily take your data with it. In Episode 5 of Building Instagram's Authentication Backend , we do the opposite. The database is not something Hibernate improvises at boot — it is a versioned artifact, checked into git, owned by Flyway . We build the persistence layer in three deliberate steps: the SQL migration , then the JPA entities , then the Spring Data r...
Before my actual M.Tech Data Science & Engineering curriculum kicked off at BITS Pilani WILP, the program ran us through two preparatory courses over a couple of weeks — an Introduction to Python course and a Zero Level Mathematical Foundation course. Eight live sessions in total, zero credits, zero pressure on paper. I went in expecting both to be easy refreshers. One of them genuinely was. The other made me reconsider how much rust I'd built up. In this post I'll walk you through what was covered in each course, what I actually learned, and my honest take on whether the bootcamp was worth the time. If you're considering BITS Pilani WILP M.Tech, planning how to prep, or just want to know what the program actually looks like before semester one starts — this should give you a real picture. Watch the Full Video I've recorded a complete walkthrough of both courses on my YouTube channel. The video covers everything below in more detail, including the slides,...