Given at Data Day Texas 2016. Apache Spark has been hailed as a trail-blazing new tool for doing distributed data science. However, since it's so new, it can be difficult to set up and hard to use. In this talk, I'll discuss the journey I've had using Spark for data science at Bitly over the past year. I'll talk about the benefits of using Spark, the challenges I've had to overcome, the caveats for using a cutting-edge technology such as this, and my hopes for the Spark project as a whole.