I never need a reason to follow a new @jennschiffer.com joint, these are very good reasons nonetheless fridge-cigarettes.pckt.blog/ai-thought-d...

New #Shapely 2.2.0 feature release! 🎉 Shapely is a Python package to work with geometry objects (wrapping GEOS). The new release comes with Python 3.15 support, performance improvements, and several new functions -> shapely.readthedocs.io/en/stable/re... #python #geopython #geospatial

Congrats on the launch. This was the last gap for me in the v2 migration and now the (Arrow/ADBC-based) databases integration is really slick!

Observable@observablehq.com · last wk.

You can now configure databases observablehq.com/team/select?... and secrets observablehq.com/team/select?... within the new Observable. Paste a database URI in the “Host” field and it will populate all fields at once. Release notes: observablehq.com/@observableh...

Thinking about this map of mosquito fleet ferry service that existed in the Puget Sound in 1901.

Second-biggest launch of 2026 is now the redesign of the redesign of example.com. 2026 is already shaping up to be a huge year.

Bryce@brycemecum.com · 2w ago

Forget about frontier lab model releases, the biggest launch of 2026 is this redesign of example.com. May very well be the launch of the decade.

Ever wonder what’s changed in InfluxDB since 2016? In this InfoQ deep dive, InfluxData CTO Paul Dix explains the 4½ year journey to re-architect InfluxDB around Rust and the FDAP stack, and the vision to go beyond a metrics store. Check it out: https://bit.ly/42NoMtj

Engineering a Time Series Database Using Open Source: Rebuilding InfluxDB 3 in Apache Arrow and Rust

At times, to evolve your product, you need to rebuild it from scratch. The article provides the story behind the rewrite of InfluxDB from scratch using a different programming language - Rust - and st...

bit.ly

Nic ( @niccrane.bsky.social) taught us all about FREAKING PARQUET FILES on the #DSLab, which are wayyyyy cooler than I realized. Parquet files: Preserve data types Are fast & small Are column-oriented so you can read just 1 col if wanted! & Positron displays'em out-the-box! ▶️ youtu.be/2mQ4kc9J9uQ

What is a Parquet file anyway? Why is Parquet good? | Nic Crane | Data Science Lab

YouTube video by Posit PBC

youtu.be

🦆 Working with RDF in DuckDB (@duckdb.org)? duck_rdf 2.8.3 is out with SPARQL enhancements, Turtle/quads export fixes, and performance improvements. Read, write, and query RDF alongside your SQL workflows. Release notes: github.com/nonodename/d... #KnowledgeGraphs #DuckDB

If anyone is interesting in signing up for the next DataFusion community showcase to describe their project, we have openings on Oct 29 -- let me know if you are interested

Software Heritage Identifiers nesbitt.io/2026/10/01/s... cc @softwareheritage.org

Software Heritage Identifiers

Notes from CodeCommons: SWHIDs, the SWH archive, and connecting both to package metadata.

nesbitt.io

today's hardware designers could never conceive of what Kazuo Kawasaki was doing in 1996

Heads up. Don't submit to CRAN right now. The CRAN submission system is currently broken, because Windows checks won't complete. If you submit your package will end up in the manual "inspection" queue. You'll see the same on win-builder R devel and R 4.6.1. The R 4.5.3 still works. #RStats

Forget about frontier lab model releases, the biggest launch of 2026 is this redesign of example.com. May very well be the launch of the decade.

gdb: thread apply all bt lldb: thread backtrace all okay, fine windbg: ~*kb wat?

This is a great Parquet file visualizer: huggingface.co/spaces/cfahl...

Parquet X-ray - a Hugging Face Space by cfahlgren1

See how a Parquet file is laid out, byte by byte

huggingface.co

As announced at posit::conf(2026) #ggsql is now, with the release of version 0.5.0, in Beta. I'm so excited for the future of this project. Read all about what the latest version brings you in the release post

ggsql 0.5.0: Readers, Writers, and Beta status

Announcing ggsql 0.5.0, with new readers and writers for getting data in and out, and the project's graduation to beta status.

opensource.posit.co

Fresh off the press: ALP: Adaptive Lossless Floating-Point Encoding in Apache Parquet parquet.apache.org/blog/2026/09... Thank you Kosta Tarasov, @andrewlamb1111.bsky.social, Prateek Gaur

Excited to be teaching again! Sign up for the Monday SedonaDB workshop to mostly learn about how query engines/databases can make large(r) data in Python less awkward!

FOSS4G North America@foss4gna.bsky.social · 3w ago

Arrive in Sacramento early and dive into hands-on workshops. Here is a sample: 🔹 Reproducible geo environments with Nix 🔹 Large spatial data in Python + SedonaDB 🔹 Disaggregating commodity flows 🔹 Cloud-native vector formats #GIS #Geospatial #EO #CNG

Some great work here by the QuantStack team! Improving the Fortran on Wasm ecosystem and better NumPy performance in the browser notebook.link/blog/the-las...

The last mile of a long road: faster NumPy in the browser | Notebook.link

NumPy on Emscripten-forge now links OpenBLAS in WebAssembly, with large speedups for matmul and linear algebra in the browser.

notebook.link

The DAVE stack: the age of domain-optimized analytical databases on Datafusion, Arrow, and Vortex, Embedded sequenceandsilicon.substack.com/p/the-dave-s...

The DAVE stack: the age of domain-optimized analytical databases on Datafusion, Arrow, and Vortex, Embedded

Weird data needs weird databases.

sequenceandsilicon.substack.com

TIL the new SQL cells on Observable support not just databases but variables defined in your notebook _and_ they output Arrow Tables which can be fed back into SQL cells: observablehq.com/@amoeba/sql-.... Nice.

PNW is good

Quick poll: When would you like CRAN to archive your package? A: Umm, never? B: Three days before posit::conf, where you're giving a talk about said package

Loved this talk by @felienne.bsky.social - and the points about "hard" things being values over "simple" things resonated a lot! www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-6-...

AI made me doubt everything about programming by Felienne Hermans - DDD Europe 2026

YouTube video by Domain-Driven Design Europe

youtube.com

this is neat to see

New post on the company blog that does a great job showing just how convoluted using ODBC is and how painless database access can be with ADBC and dbc: columnar.tech/blog/odbc-dr...

The ODBC Driver Scavenger Hunt

ADBC’s advantages start before the first query runs.

columnar.tech

This release is cool for a lot of reasons but my favorite is that the new Observable does database access with ADBC and returns results as Arrow. And, as a bonus, it uses @columnar.tech 's dbc (dbc.how) to install drivers.

Observable@observablehq.com · last mo.

For more than a year, we’ve been quietly building an all-new Observable. Today, that new Observable is live on observablehq.com. Read Mike @ocks.org’s announcement: observablehq.com/@observableh...

technology optimism hour, the reprise! last edition was in 2022. this edition: typescript 7, effect, long hardware update cycles, decentralized social media, and encrypted messaging macwright.com/2026/08/14/o...

Technology optimism hour

Finding some cool stuff to be pumped about in the world of software and hardware

macwright.com