US tech companies have their pride, but you know what Europe has? Awesome TLDs. YouTube uses a Belgian TLD for youtu(.)be. Anthropic uses a German TLD for Clau(.)de. Pinterest uses an Italian TLD for pin(.)it One more reason to build in Europe.

We're in particular times. AI is moving so fast that we're questioning every single way we work every day. Honestly, it's been exhausting for me. I know I'm not alone. It's okay. Particular times.

Obsidian Markdown vaults break past ~7k notes. Dataview chokes, sync gets flaky. Used to be a power-user problem. With LLMs pumping out notes on demand, everyone's vault is about to get huge. Files-as-truth + derived SQLite/DuckDB index feels obvious. Who's building it?

Running an AI workshop? build a minter. I wanted 150+ attendees to run an analytics agent against DuckDB. Local inference was out, smallest reasonable model is a 7GB download, and conf wifi says lol... https://blog.mehdio.com/p/running-an-ai-workshop-build-a-llm

Running an AI workshop ? Build a LLM key minter first

While prepping my PyCon DE & PyData 2026 talk (slides), I wanted 150+ people to run an analytics agent against DuckDB.

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The best feeling is when you burn tokens to REMOVE code

Apparently the AI power users are the ones most burnt out. Heard it at PyCon, and even DHH and Simon Willison say agentic coding is mentally rewiring them... In this edition : the 2026 compute crunch, agent burnout, and my Claude status bar in tmux https://blog.mehdio.com/p/ctrlr-13-agents-dont-slee

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!

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

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!

"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

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.

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

I'm not sure you are all ready for this... See you tomorrow 🫡

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.

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.

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...

ctlr+r #02: How to not get stupid & The Parquet Killer?

A weekly recall from the terminal of my mind: Thoughts 🧠, 🛠 Tools, and 📕 Takes.

blog.mehdio.com

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...

ctlr+r #01: Toon, LLM CLIs

Hey there, I’m starting a new habit that I hope to stick with and that will help you: ctrl+r : a weekly recall from the terminal of my mind.

blog.mehdio.com

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...

An actually useful MCP for web cevelopment

Eliminates the copy-paste hell with browser-tools

blog.mehdio.com

I don't kill my side projects. I just quietly stop maintaining them while convincing myself I'll definitely get back to that one.

Using Docker Desktop or Podman on macOS? WWDC surprise: Apple's own containerization framework. The end of 3rd party containers on Mac? youtu.be/s06VHrb_Fss

Apple’s new ‘Container’ Engine (Bye Docker?)

YouTube video by mehdio DataTV

youtu.be