Cuttings

DuckDB 2.0.0 LTS “Cinnamon Teal” released. Includes “agent mode”, DuckDB as a server (quack protocol), triggers, and more

Linus Torvalds with some wise words, in his own inimitable style :D

“The LLM grinds everything into the same inherently untrustable confidently-expressed blandness”

Guess what? Even the cool kids know that sometimes you don’t reinvent the wheel, you just model your data properly :)

> the definition of active user depends on which dimensions you anchor to.

Chris Gambill nails it in this discussion of why holding data at multiple levels of refinement makes a ton of sense, and is not just “duplication”

🪝 I love a good hook at the beginning of a blog post, and Elena Verna nails this one

This rant from Brent Ozar is my kind of rant. Love it. Is it ironic posting it on LI? Don’t care. People should read it.

last week I made r/dataengineering cross, this week it’s the AI-sceptics on lobst.rs :D

Brittany Ellich absolutely nails it in this excellent article: “But here’s the thing: no one actually knows what the future is going to be.”

Excellent blog post from Nicoleta Lazar comparing query federation between Trino and StarRocks with sources including Iceberg

Think I just realised why some software devs are still so voraciously stubborn in their anti-AI stance.

How was December 2013 both only yesterday and over twelve years ago?!

Either way, some articles’ core messages hold true over time—and this is one of those articles.

Rather chuffed to get featured on @c_a_dunlop’s blog (alongside many names who I’ve fanboi’d for years, giving me serious imposter syndrome 🙃)

I enjoyed this Hard Fork interview; very accessible for a layperson like me :)

> Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s in-house philosopher in charge of shaping Claude’s personality, discusses the company’s newly released “Claude Constitution”

I put together a quick list of TUIs for #ApacheKafka. Any others to add to this list? Which ones are people using?

What one conference talk do you keep coming back to, again and again, over the years?

I’ll start: @Gwen (Chen) Shapira’s “Streaming Microservices: Contracts & Compatibility” talk from QCon 2017:

(Related to this, a tweet from Gwen a year later but it still makes me chuckle: “Don’t make me go out there and unfuck your data pipelines for you.” https://x.com/gwenshap/status/967118574014799872)

OK, this is exactly what I was looking for: “Lessons Learned from Building LinkedIn’s First Agent: Hiring Assistant”.

Anyone got more good examples like this? https://twitter.com/rmoff/status/1999426776037044420

A step-by-step guide to building a key-value database from scratch: - love the explainer/interactive animation in this

One for my DBA friends! A very good talk from @andypavlo.bsky.social, looking at how LLMs can actually be used to help improve performance. It’s measured and reasonable, with plenty of caveats and real-world considerations from someone who really gets RDBMS.

Good post from Sam Harris about public speaking, including some good lessons for conference speakers specifically

One of the things I love about @vanlightly.bsky.social’s posts is that he is both opinionated and highly informed and articulate in his argument. This post is a great example: Why I’m not a fan of zero-copy Apache Kafka-Apache Iceberg

Have you ever found yourself thinking…Flink Watermarks…WTF? 🔥 This new tool might be for you :)

It’s a hands-on, scrollytelling walkthrough of what watermarks in #ApacheFlink are, why they matter, and how to use them.

Try it out

Good article from @pedramnavid.com about building a successful DevRel team.

Measured and considered, and lots of wisdom. A++++ would read again.

I really enjoyed this talk from Paul Iusztin at QCon London. Covers lots of concepts around like LLMs, RAG, and Agents and explains them well.

Now I wish I’d watched this before I tried figuring it out for myself 😅 Tim Berglund nails it in this crystal-clear explanation of MCP