Latest AI and tech news
As 2026 hurtles towards the holiday season and then on into 2027, I took a moment to canvass opinion from some of y’all as to the shape of this newsletter....
It’s been a few years since Current (and before that, Kafka Summit) was in San Francisco, but here we are—on November 4 & 5 we’ll be there, and I’m excited to continue a tradition that started back in 2019 with a run over the Golden Gate Bridge....
I’m going to try to avoid falling into the trap of making a bad pun about the season…damnit! ;-)...
In the UK August is known in the press as "silly season" (because nothing of note happens, so the only stories published are nonsense ones).
Turns out this doesn’t apply to the world of data and AI blog posts - still over 50 interesting ones for me t...
Sheesh, 162 links this month.
What is going ON?
There is just too much interesting material being written, and that’s after filtering out clanker slop.
I’m pretty sure I need to curtail the scope of these link posts at some point.
I added the 🔥 emoji...
Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play.
It’s an arms-race to the bottom of a cesspit....
June has been a busy month—113 links below for your enjoyment and delectation....
Welcome to May’s Interesting Links!
This month saw the Current conference in London with the usual 5k run, lots of familiar faces and friendly conversations—and plenty of excellent breakout sessions too.
It seems live-tweeting conferences isn’t a thi...
Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work.
And just like the young child’s drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up on th...
Another year, another Current—another 5k run/walk for anyone who’d like to join!...
It’s now a joy to simply read any blog post that’s not AI-generated....
A bit of a streamlined edition, this month.
Lots of interesting links still, but less commentary.
You can put that down to me prevaricating on getting my previous blog about Materialized Tables in Apache Flink finished, and leaving myself little time...
Flink added support for what it calls Materialized Tables in 1.20, released in 2024.
You can read about the design and motivations in FLIP-435.
In a nutshell, Materialized Tables provide a way to include the SQL to populate and refresh a table as par...
After cobbling together my own eval for Claude, I was interested to discover harbor.
It’s described as:...
As a non-Java coder, for the last ten years I’ve stumbled my way through the JVM-centric world of "big data" (as it was called then), relying on my wits with SQL and config files to just about muddle through.
One of the things that drew me to Kafka C...
I’ve had a huge amount of fun this month exploring quite what AI (in the form of Claude Code) can do for a data engineer.
Rather than just hack around at a prompt, I took a bit more of a considered approach to it, building a harness to test out diffe...
I wanted to explore the extent to which Claude Code could build a data pipeline using dbt without iterative prompting.
What difference did skills, models, and the prompt itself make?
I’ve written in a separate post about what I found (yes it’s good; ...
As any followers of my blog will have seen recently, I am a big fan of the productivity—and enjoyment—that AI can bring to one’s work.
(In fact, I firmly believe that to opt out of using AI is a somewhat negative step to take in terms of one’s career...
Ten years late (but hopefully not a dollar short) I recently figured out what all the fuss about dbt is about....
This is an addendum to the main post about using Claude Code with dbt.
It shows an excerpt of a Claude session log so you can see exactly what goes on "under the covers"....
Phew, what a month!
February may be shorter but that’s not diminished the wealth of truly interesting posts I’ve found to share with you this month....
How do you use your LLM coding agent?
Mine is usually Claude the proofreader, Claude the bash monkey, Claude the webdev.
All these things are about tasks completed.
Read this, write that code, fix that web page....
Last year I wrote a blog post about building a data processing pipeline using DuckDB to ingest weather sensor data from the UK’s Environment Agency.
The pipeline was based around a set of SQL scripts, and whilst it used important data engineering pra...
In which Claude and [A]I play at being webdevs.
For some reflections on the bigger picture of AI as a productivity tool for developers, have a look at the companion post to this one....
Funnily enough, Charles Dickens was talking about late 18th century Europe rather than the state of AI and LLMs in 2026, but here goes:...
LLMs are rapidly changing how we use the internet.
Remember just a few years ago when you’d search for something on Google and scroll through the results like some kind of Neanderthal?
Heck, you might even click through to page 2 if you were feeling ...
This is the twelfth edition of this newsletter in its current form.
It’s great to see the audience for it growing, and consistently positive reception when I share it.
Nice words always inspire me to carry on with it :D
The substack edition (which is...
In late 2025 the company behind MinIO decided to abandon it to pursue other commercial interests.
As well as upsetting a bunch of folk, it also put the cat amongst the pigeons of many software demos that relied on MinIO to emulate S3 storage locally,...
"What are the must-have apps to install on my new Mac?"…
"Which tool makes you the most productive?"…
"Do you still use Alfred?"…...
Well it’s that time of year already!
Whilst munching on a mince pie, enjoy the final Interesting Links for 2025....
Reddit is one of the longer-standing platforms on the internet, bringing together folk to discuss, rant, grumble, and troll others on all sorts of topics, from Kafka to data engineering to nerding out over really bright torches to grumbling about the...
Welcome to the 10th edition of Interesting Links.
I’ve got over a hundred links for you this month—all of them, IMHO, interesting :)...
As part of compiling the monthly interesting links posts, I go through a ton of RSS feeds, sourced from specific blogs that I follow as well as general aggregators.
These aggregators include quality sources like InfoQ, and certain tags on lobste.rs.
...
Nor me, but that’s what I’ve felt like I’ve been attempting to do when trying to really understand agents, as well as to come up with an example agent to build....
At Current 2025 in New Orleans this year we built a demo for the Day 2 keynote that would automagically summarise what was happening in the room, as reported by members of the audience.
Here’s how we did it!...
The latest Thoughtworks TechRadar is out.
Here are some of the more data-related ‘blips’ (as they’re called on the radar) that I noticed....
What with Current NOLA 2025 happening this week, and some very last minute preparations for the demo at the keynote on day 2, this month’s links roundup is pushing it right up to the wire :)
The demo was pretty cool, and finally I have a good example...
A presentation about effective blog writing for developers, covering why to blog, what to write about, and how to structure your content....
A short series of notes for myself as I learn more about the AI ecosystem as of Autumn [Fall] 2025.
The driver for all this is understanding more about Apache Flink’s Flink Agents project, and Confluent’s Streaming Agents....
It’s a bumper set of links this month—I started with an original backlog of 125 links to get through.
Some fell by the wayside, but plenty of others (78, to be precise) made the cut.
With no further ado, let’s get cracking!...
Having looked at MCP, Models, and RAG, I realised that I’ve been mentally skirting around something that I don’t really understand, so I’m going to expose myself to some ridicule here and try to understand better: what’s the difference between AI and...