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I'm back at PyCon/PyData DE!
Last year in Berlin the workshop was sold out 🤯 It was a lot of fun and this year, I'm getting backup to provide you the best learning experience!
We'll be sharing all we know about analytics agents... and the ducks...of course DuckDB!
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Wait Mehdi, almost 2 months since the last ctrl+r?!
Travel, sickness, and (not to mention) a newborn got me deep into survival mode. Bear with me while I find my rhythm again.
The good news: I’ve been experimenting non-stop, so this is a triple edition : 3 🧠 thoughts on AI and 3 🛠️ tools I tried.
Learning vim bindings is the best investment I've made over the past decade to improve my productivity as a software engineer.
And it's still paying off today.
Me trying to keep up with AI news while getting actual work done
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I was missing key metadata info on Claude Code, and I found this little gem last week:
https://cship.dev/
If you're already a Starship user like me, adding this extension is a no-brainer. It shows you the amount spent, context window usage, and the selected model!
Yeah seit is a thing. However as soon as you need collaboration features, complexity increase significantly. I was mostly ref to SaaS sub solo user have
"Can we add brand style and colors?"
Old BI vendor: "I'm afraid that's not possible."
Me: "Pick one."
You just burned $1k in tokens to rebuild the SaaS you refused to pay $29/month for.
Great for the ego. Now maintain it for 3 years to break even.
Yup, maintenance is a luxury these days.
Most CFPs have a ~6 month gap between submission and the actual talk.
Given how much changed in the last 6 months... I suspect a lot of speakers will be quietly rewriting their slides the week before.
So if the title doesn't quite match the content... keep an open mind. That's probably a good sign
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GitHub has all the pieces for an agentic IDE: Copilot agent, Actions, Codespaces. But it's async—fire and forget.
Cursor nails real-time pair programming. You and the agent coding together.
The holy grail? Hybrid mode. GitHub could build it, unconstrained by VSCode legacy.
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OK so I made a mini movie on how to survive in data engineering.
No bias. Just ducks.
https://youtu.be/f0DDhKaZDDc
plz netflix contact for collab
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I'm not sure you are all ready for this...
See you tomorrow 🫡
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2026 paradox:
We question whether LLMs are intelligent enough.
Instead of deciding whether we’ll stay intelligent while using them.
Two years ago I’d say niche down as a software engineer.
Now I’m building far outside my niche (data engineering).
It's not “Should I learn React?” but “Do I understand the problem well enough to direct AI?”
Execution is commoditized; domain expertise still matters.
Generalists win.
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RIP Mehdio (2019)
Time for a fresh new profile picture.
Same person. Bolder. Less hair. Hopefully wiser.
In 2026, I want to keep teaching curious students—both in person and online—and help the next generation learn not just data, but software engineering in this (post-?) AI wave.
Quick software engineers reality check:
2024: AI writes code quickly — quality is meh
2025: AI writes solid code and boosts productivity
2026: Not using AI effectively becomes a liability
2026 is the year coding with AI is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must-have.
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A few observations from shipping with AI these past weeks :
1) TS quietly wins for AI apps (types catch hallucinations at lint time).
2) Juniors risk building human debt by skipping fundamentals.
3) AI + money works only with verification (SQL saved me). Constraints > vibes.
For all the parents out there, I’m launching something new: the Portable family newsletter
After living in 4 countries over the past years with young kids, I’m sharing stories on how we did it. Just honestly covering what worked, and what didn't work.
This week's issue: thinking on how to not get more stupid with LLMs eating our brains, spinning up the new hype file format Vortex (it's gaining a lot of adoption), and other tech muse from the terminal of my mind.
blog.mehdio.com/p/ctlrr-02-h...
Starting a weekly habit/newsletter.
Each issue includes:
- something I’ve been thinking about
- something I’ve built, tried, or found useful
- something I read or watched, with my take
blog.mehdio.com/p/ctlrr-01-t...
The Data Engineering Roundtable
We cover everything from interview prep and data quality struggles to the eternal "just a small schema change".
Each question gets four different perspectives from @seattledataguy.bsky.social, @hachej.bsky.social, @mehdio.com, and me, with practical wisdom that goes beyond the hype.
2 things that my non tech friends asked me recently :
WTH is
- us-east-1
- astronomer
I wonder what's next.
If you’ve ever found yourself in copy-paste hell during webdev — debugging logs, pasting API errors into an AI chat, or sending screenshots just to say “the button isn’t there"
I wrote something for you.
blog.mehdio.com/p/an-actuall...
I don't kill my side projects.
I just quietly stop maintaining them while convincing myself I'll definitely get back to that one.
I think it will change the fundamentals of the business long term. Short term, a lot of noise and spikes.
You are right; I've seen, for instance, Supabase putting some rules to set projects on pause, close inactive projects pretty aggressively after 7 days.
