Terms of use
1. What brickster.io is
brickster.io is an independent, community-run set of practice exercises for people learning the Databricks platform. It is operated by the site's maintainers and by nobody else. It is not a Databricks product or service, it is not part of the Databricks Labs program, and it is not affiliated with, sponsored by, endorsed by, certified by or supported by Databricks, Inc. or by any other company or open-source foundation whose products the labs mention.
By using the site you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the site.
2. Accounts
Signing in uses GitHub OAuth. One account per person. You are responsible for what happens under your account. You must be at least 16 years old, or the age of digital consent where you live if that is lower, and at least 13 in any case.
You can delete your account at any time from your profile page. We may suspend or delete an account that breaks these terms, with or without notice.
3. Scores are not credentials
Points, ranks, badges and passed labs on this site are a game. They are not a certification, qualification, accreditation or professional credential of any kind. They are not issued, recognised, validated or endorsed by Databricks, Inc. or by any other organisation, and they say nothing about your eligibility for any Databricks certification or exam.
Any certifications listed on a user profile were typed in by that user. We do not check them against the issuing body, and their presence on this site is not verification.
4. You bring your own Databricks account
The labs are run in your Databricks workspace, under whatever agreement you have with Databricks, Inc. We do not provide, resell, broker or administer Databricks accounts, compute or data, and we have no visibility into your workspace. Where a lab notes that it runs on Databricks Free Edition, that is a statement about the resources the lab needs, not permission from anyone: you are responsible for checking that your use is allowed under your own Databricks terms, and for any cost your workspace incurs. The same goes for GitHub and for any other third-party service you use to complete a lab.
5. Acceptable use
You agree not to:
- submit a notebook, or any part of one, that you did not run yourself;
- hand-edit notebook outputs, or otherwise submit results your code did not produce;
- share or publish lab answers, expected values or salts, the write-up box on a lab you have passed is the one place to discuss how you solved it, and even there you must not paste a salt or an expected value;
- use a write-up, a vote or a rating to advertise, harass anyone, or post anything you would not want attributed to your GitHub account;
- work around the rate limits, duplicate-file check or salted checks;
- scrape, bulk-download or republish the labs, starter notebooks or datasets;
- upload anything unlawful, malicious, or containing other people's personal data or credentials, do not put secrets, tokens or production data in a notebook you submit;
- impersonate anyone, including any employee of Databricks, Inc., in your handle, bio or profile fields.
Submissions found to break these rules may be voided, which removes their points, and repeat offences may cost you the account.
6. Content
The labs, instructions, starter notebooks, validator and the datasets we ship are ours, and are made available to you for your own learning only. Everything else, the bio, links, country and certification entries on your profile, and any write-up you post on a lab, is yours. By posting it you let us store and display it on this site for as long as you keep it there, and you confirm it is your own work, that it is true, and that you have the right to post it.
A write-up is visible to every other person who has passed that lab, and to us. It is not shown to people who have not passed it and it is not indexed by search engines, but it is not private either: do not put anything in it you would mind a stranger reading. You can edit or delete your own write-up at any time from the lab page, and deleting your account takes every write-up, vote and rating with it.
We may remove any write-up, without notice, if it breaks section 5, gives away answers, or is simply not what the box is for. Removal deletes the write-up and its votes; it does not affect the points you earned for passing the lab.
If you believe something on this site infringes your copyright or your trademark, write to legal@brickster.io with enough detail to find it and we will act on it promptly.
7. No warranty
The site is provided "as is" and "as available", with no warranty of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not promise the labs are correct, that the validator is right, that the site stays available, or that your scores, submissions or profile survive. Nothing here is professional, legal or career advice.
8. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost data, or costs you incur in any third-party service, including compute charges in your Databricks workspace. Our total liability for any claim relating to this site is capped at the greater of the amount you have paid us, which for a free site is nothing, and 50 EUR.
9. Changes and termination
We may change these terms; the date at the top says when they last changed, and continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it. We may change, suspend or shut down the site or any lab at any time.
10. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the jurisdiction in which the site's operator is established, and the courts of that jurisdiction have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute, without prejudice to any mandatory consumer protections you have where you live.
Privacy
What we collect
- From GitHub, when you sign in: your GitHub numeric id, handle, display name, avatar URL, and, only into profile fields you have left empty, your public company, location and X/Twitter handle. We request no OAuth scopes, so we see only what your GitHub profile shows the world. We never receive your GitHub password or email.
- From you: a bio, a website link, a credentials-wallet link, a country, any certification entries you add, and, on labs you have passed, your write-up, the write-ups you upvote, and your difficulty rating.
- From your submissions: which lab, whether it passed, the points awarded, how many checks passed, the time, and a SHA-256 hash of the file you uploaded. The uploaded notebook itself is never written to disk or to the database. It is read in memory, checked, hashed and dropped. The hash exists so the same file cannot be passed between accounts; it cannot be turned back into your notebook.
- A session cookie (
brickster_session), which holds a random identifier, is HTTP-only, and expires after 30 days. It is strictly necessary to keep you signed in.
There is no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixel and no third-party script on this site, so there is no cookie banner to click.
What is public
Your handle, avatar, name, country flag, bio, links, certification entries, points, rank and the labs you have passed appear on your profile and on the scoreboard, and are indexed by search engines. Your most recent passes also appear in the feed on the home page. Everything else stays internal. If you do not want a field to be public, leave it empty.
Write-ups sit one step behind that: a write-up and its vote count are shown, with your handle and avatar, to anyone who has passed that lab, and to us. They are not on your profile, not on the scoreboard and not in the sitemap, so search engines do not index them. Who voted for what is never shown to anyone but the voter. Difficulty ratings are only ever published as totals.
Why we are allowed to hold it
We process this data to run the account, score the labs and publish the scoreboard you signed up for, that is performance of a contract with you, and, for the anti-cheat hash and rate limits, on our legitimate interest in keeping the scoreboard honest.
Who else sees it
Our hosting and infrastructure providers process it on our behalf: Cloudflare (hosting and delivery), Neon (the database) and GitHub (sign-in). We do not sell it, share it for advertising, or hand it to anyone else unless the law requires it.
How long we keep it
Until you delete your account. Deleting it removes your user row and, by cascade, your sessions, certification entries, write-ups, votes, ratings and every submission, including the hashes. Sessions expire on their own after 30 days. Deletion is immediate and cannot be undone; backups age out on our providers' own schedules.
Your rights
If the GDPR or a similar law applies to you, you have the right to access, correct, delete, export, restrict and object to the processing of your data. Most of that is self-serve: your profile page edits and deletes everything we hold. For anything else, write to legal@brickster.io. You can also complain to your local data protection authority.
Trademarks
brickster.io is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, endorsed by or supported by any of the organisations named below. Their names and logos are used here only to describe, truthfully, what the labs are about, nominative use, and no claim of ownership, partnership, certification or approval is made or implied. Logos are reproduced unmodified, at their own proportions; none has been recoloured, restyled or combined with our own branding.
- Databricks, Databricks SQL, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Lakeflow, Mosaic AI, Databricks Labs and Databricks Free Edition are trademarks or registered trademarks of Databricks, Inc.
- Apache, Apache Spark, Apache Iceberg and the Apache feather logo are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation.
- MLflow, Delta Lake and Unity Catalog are also projects hosted by The Linux Foundation and LF AI & Data Foundation, whose trademark policies apply to those marks.
- GitHub is a trademark of GitHub, Inc., a Microsoft company.
- All other product names, logos and brands are the property of their respective owners.
If you own one of these marks and want a reference on this site changed or removed, write to legal@brickster.io and we will do it.