aleda145

As a data engineering person I can say that this is a great write up!

Some thoughts:

A "bubbling" topic right now is conversational analytics (i.e. talk to your data). There has been an explosion of tools in the last 6 months. YC is backing one too: https://getnao.io/

I feel like pandas is also somewhat frowned upon, the industry has moved on from that. Most SQL tools can now do everything that we could only do with pandas.

In my network everyone is talking about DuckDB. As long as you are under a 1TB it will have everything you need. I think most people should start with that vs locking themselves into something like Snowflake

I have never heard of Denodo before. "The only real semantic layer" is a bold claim. From the website it just looks like another data governance tool?

Got another daughter last week!

There were a lot of complications post delivery, and I want to make some sort of interactive story about it. We'll see how it goes

(Everyone is safe and sound)

I let agents write my code but not my commits. I think I gain some understanding by doing `git diff` and then writing the (brief) commit message myself.

Örebropartiet is like the weirdest party in Sweden. It's named after "Örebro", a Swedish city with 125k population. The party's founder, Markus Allard, used to be far left politician before turning far right.

Their party program is all over the place. They stand for free dental care, direct democracy and deporting immigrants.

Marcus is also known for profanity and foul language in council meetings.

An oddity in Swedish politics is that if a local party manages to get 12% of the votes in a constituency they are eligible for getting a seat in parliament, and can skip the regular 4% popular vote rule.

Örebropartiet actually has a chance to get into national government next election (Fall 2026) since their local support is quite strong. Times are weird

I think the animosity comes from most people just encountering the "slop". Generated ads, fake content or low quality music.

I just started doing this last week!

I'm not very good at C++, but coupled with the extension template and codex I got a basic version of my extension working within an hour. Go for it!

Are you doing a bespoke canvas engine or using tldraw/excalidraw?

Adding agents to my SQL canvas (https://kavla.dev)

Here's a live example of it figuring out when to post on HN: https://kavla.dev/hn (spoiler, its noon UTC on Sundays)

And here's it generating an interactive map of 20000 earthquakes: https://kavla.dev/quakes

I feel like the canvas is actually a great way to interact with an agent, everything it does is visible, so auditing what it did is (relatively) easy.

I still got some credits to burn so agent usage is free atm (you still have to sign up to use it though)

This sent me on a trip down memory lane! So nice that they are still going.

I solved a few of their problems almost 10 years ago. Looking at my repo I have absolutely regressed mathematically. I apparently solved project 15 without any code: https://github.com/aleda145/projecteuler/blob/master/problem...

(spoilers for: https://projecteuler.net/problem=15)

No way I would have reached for combinatorics if I got this problem at work.

This makes me a bit sad :(

That's a great point! "Speed to insight" feels more important than ever

Cool! But as a data engineer I don't know when I would ever use this. Getting data into a centralized place so it can be joined and queried easily is like prio 1 for any data team.

I'm sure SREs will really love me doing expensive adhoc queries against production postgres /s

I've yet to work in enterprises big enough to have multi cloud data warehouses though, maybe it's more useful in that setting?

I recently picked up writing short stories again. I briefly looked at different editors, but ended up just doing it in vscode (daily driver). I'll make sure to look at cheese paper for the next one, looks like it has some cool features!

A feature that I have been dreaming about is making an editor that treats each paragraph like a unit of work, and the full text is created by linking together different paragraphs. That way you can easily try different ways without deleting any text. Sort of like nodes in a graph.

And here's my a corporate themed short story: https://dahl.dev/capacity

Really nice! I tried out a similar thing but with tldraw as the canvas engine: https://github.com/aleda145/terminaldraw

I see Cate also uses node-pty. I didn't know what psuedo terminals were before, it's cool stuff

I don't know, it is a useful signal that the person did not think deeply about their code changes, and should be treated as such.

Oh so lobbying the EU comission to both slash CO2 targets and adding tolls to chinese EV cars did not actually make German auto manufacturers more competitive. Who would have thunk?

Yes I'm bitter how much influence the German car companies have over the union.

Is it egress or storage that's the main cost driver?

WSL support too? Could be cool with a unified thing, not sure if that's even possible though.

Still working on my SQL canvas: https://kavla.dev/

I started with this last summer. Usually I get tired of an idea, but this one is just an endless pit of things to try out.

Currently seeing how we can get an analytics agent working on the canvas. Video here: https://x.com/i/status/2053410747137266070

I appreciate this part of the agent instructions: `AESTHETICS ARE VERY IMPORTANT. All apps should LOOK AMAZING and have GREAT FUNCTIONALITY!`

Mosaic is super cool!

Took me a while to grok what it's all about, I think this example really helps: https://idl.uw.edu/mosaic/examples/flights-10m.html

Super cool! Please give me a ping if you ever launch that (my email is on my website (in my profile))

Appreciate you putting the entire book online!

I read parts of it a while ago when I had an idea on using webRTC data channels to pass data from databases to browser clients via a CLI. Your book made me understand that it's probably not a great fit for my use case. I just used a centralized control plane and websockets instead.

I still feel like there is something fun that we can do with webRTC data channels + zero copy Apache Arrow arraybuffers + duckdb WASM, but haven't figured it out yet

Because I'm curious, how come you picked php for the backend?

I remember p2hari commenting on one of my "What are you working on" comments, so maybe they got it from there. Anyway, here's the link: https://kavla.dev/

Thank you! :-)

I have felt this a lot when designing the landing page for my SQL canvas side project. _I_ really want to write about DuckDB WASM, pre-signed URLs and how cool Cloudflare's durable objects are.

But my target audience are data analysts, and they just want to analyze some data!

I have gone through a lot of design revisions because I have a hard time containing my technical excitement. I was surprised how hard communicating a product clearly is.

As a backend/data person I was on the high horse thinking that designers jobs are so much easier than distributed systems. Now I feel the opposite!

Oh my. What could possibly be the justification for this?

I totally agree on investing in a sane data model upfront. So many production systems have schemas that only made sense to the engineer that created them. I would be delighted if I can read a schema and understand what a column means without having to dig through a bunch of migration PRs.

I recently encountered `is_as BOOL` in an important table. After way too much invested time we found out it meant "is active service". </DDL rant>

I recently switched from Shotcut to Kdenlive. Kdenlive's UX is much more intuitive. Lots of features, I still feel like a beginner, which is such a fun feeling!

I'm using it together with OBS to post short demo videos of my side project. I could use Loom I guess, but I prefer to keep my tech stack FOSS when I can.

Creating "non standard" video resolutions is a bit of a pain though. But I've solved that with an ffmpeg oneliner.