You don’t necessarily need LLMs for this.

Never gets old

Sounds disrespectful to a lot of OSS maintainers

(Re)discovering Your Calling I may have convinced you that designing your career around a certain specialization is a goal worth pursuing.

But how do you find that specialization? www.independentengineer.co/p/rediscover...

Second post in The Independent Engineer (my new newsletter!) focuses on a very important question: how to (re)discover your calling as a software engineer?

I believe specialization is important, especially if you'd like to explore the idea of becoming a solopreneur in the future.

20+ minutes to modify a config in an empty cluster. FML

Why does it take AWS 40 (!) minutes to provision a 3-node MSK cluster? Do they manually bring a new server rack for this?

I understand why a rolling update might be slow, but creating from scratch? Really?

Software Engineers Have Been Lied To When I just started my software engineering career, it was very obvious what the next step looked like: get more experience, become senior.

www.independentengineer.co/p/software-e...

But this doesn’t happen overnight. I spent a decade building my personal brand, growing the network, working as a consultant part-time, then full-time. I carefully chose the teams I joined and the jobs I took. And I’ll be sharing everything I learned in the past decade.

You can call it being a solopreneur or a consultant.

I believe any software engineer can do it given enough focus and discipline.

I'm starting a new newsletter! For a while, I wanted to share my experience building an independent business. Specifically, building a business as a software engineer. A business where you keep building systems, solving problems, writing code - whatever you really enjoy doing.

GitHub - nicolasmd87/aether: A compiled actor-based programming language with type inference, designed for concurrent systems. A compiled actor-based programming language with type inference, designed for concurrent systems. - nicolasmd87/aether

It's beautiful github.com/nicolasmd87/...

The course: streamacademy.io/course/advan...

I believe this is the best way to level up your Flink expertise: I talk about Flink internals, low-level primitives, advanced patterns and best practices. For example, I show how to use the State Processor API to perform state migrations and how to evolve a Flink SQL pipeline using compiled plans.

The Advanced Apache Flink training is now available as a self-paced, on-demand course!

I ran the first cohort of the training in January and also had the chance to conduct a few corporate training sessions with the same program. I’ve received a lot of great feedback, iterated and polished content.

a close up of a man 's face with blue eyes looking at the camera . ALT: a close up of a man 's face with blue eyes looking at the camera .

When did cloud warehouses become cheap? I always thought it was more about the convenience of a managed service, not price

Pencil – Design on canvas. Land in code. Pencil fundamentally increases your engineering speed by bringing designing directly into your preferred IDE.

www.pencil.dev FTW

Apache DataFusion Meetup Stockholm, March 2026 YouTube video by Andrew Lamb

Recording and slides available from the DataFusion Stockholm Meetup:
Recording: youtu.be/9u4cNmL14Xs

Slides: github.com/apache/dataf...

I'm not asking much, can we open two files with the same name in 2026?

Practicing

Last night at the Vancouver Kafka meetup.

Finally, it's here! Time for an upgrade.

Interesting links - February 2026

✍🏻 Interesting Links in the Data & AI World, February 2026

Links from @gunnarmorling.dev, @nbuesing.bsky.social, @ssp.sh, @sap1ens.com, @neelesh.bsky.social, @rstephens.me, @justincormack.bsky.social, @sogrady.org, @simonwillison.net, @cassidoo.co, and more!

🔗 rmoff.net/2026/02/27/i...

At Vancouver Systems meetup

How do I get a signed copy 👀

Benchmarking CDC Tools: Supermetal vs Debezium vs Flink CDC Classic "Big Data" stack vs Rust & Arrow.

In the latest edition of the Data Streaming Journal, you can read everything about my benchmarks: which technology is the fastest, by how much, and what you can do to bridge the gap.

www.streamingdata.tech/p/benchmarki...

Can a Rust project be 3x faster than a popular Java project right out of the box?

I’m a big fan of RBIR: Rewrite Bigdata in Rust. So when @supermetal-inc.bsky.social recently launched Kafka sink support, I decided to take it for a spin and compare its performance with Debezium and Flink CDC.

Any plans to go to Vancouver next? :)

TURNSTILE - BIRDS YouTube video by TWI_STA

Winner (WTF?): www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_qh...

Dream Theater - Night Terror (Official Video) YouTube video by Dream Theater

Nominee: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IPT...