rmoff's random ramblings

In the UK August is known in the press as "silly season" (because nothing of note happens, so the only stories published are nonsense ones).

Sheesh, 162 links this month.

Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play.

June has been a busy month—113 links below for your enjoyment and delectation.

Welcome to May’s Interesting Links!

Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work.

Another year, another Current—another 5k run/walk for anyone who’d like to join!

It’s now a joy to simply read any blog post that’s not AI-generated.

A bit of a streamlined edition, this month.

Flink added support for what it calls Materialized Tables in 1.20, released in 2024.

After cobbling together my own eval for Claude, I was interested to discover harbor.

As a non-Java coder, for the last ten years I’ve stumbled my way through the JVM-centric world of "big data" (as it was called then), relying on my wits with SQL and config files to just about muddle through.

I’ve had a huge amount of fun this month exploring quite what AI (in the form of Claude Code) can do for a data engineer.

I wanted to explore the extent to which Claude Code could build a data pipeline using dbt without iterative prompting.

tl;dr I use AI heavily on this blog.

Ten years late (but hopefully not a dollar short) I recently figured out what all the fuss about dbt is about.

This is an addendum to the main post about using Claude Code with dbt.

Yes, you’re right AI slop is ruining the internet.

Phew, what a month!

How do you use your LLM coding agent?

Apparently, you can teach an old dog new tricks.

In which Claude and [A]I play at being webdevs.

Funnily enough, Charles Dickens was talking about late 18th century Europe rather than the state of AI and LLMs in 2026, but here goes: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the

LLMs are rapidly changing how we use the internet.

This is the twelfth edition of this newsletter in its current form.

In late 2025 the company behind MinIO decided to abandon it to pursue other commercial interests.

"What are the must-have apps to install on my new Mac?"

Well it’s that time of year already!

Reddit is one of the longer-standing platforms on the internet, bringing together folk to discuss, rant, grumble, and troll others on all sorts of topics, from Kafka to data engineering to nerding out over really bright torches to grumbling about the state

Welcome to the 10th edition of Interesting Links.

As part of compiling the monthly interesting links posts, I go through a ton of RSS feeds, sourced from specific blogs that I follow as well as general aggregators.

Ever tried to hammer a nail in with a potato?

At Current 2025 in New Orleans this year we built a demo for the Day 2 keynote that would automagically summarise what was happening in the room, as reported by members of the audience.

The latest Thoughtworks TechRadar is out.

What with Current NOLA 2025 happening this week, and some very last minute preparations for the demo at the keynote on day 2, this month’s links roundup is pushing it right up to the wire :) The demo was pretty cool, and finally I have a good example of h…

A presentation about effective blog writing for developers, covering why to blog, what to write about, and how to structure your content.

A short series of notes for myself as I learn more about the AI ecosystem as of Autumn [Fall] 2025.

Sneaking it in just before the end of the month!

Having looked at MCP, Models, and RAG, I realised that I’ve been mentally skirting around something that I don’t really understand, so I’m going to expose myself to some ridicule here and try to understand better: what’s the difference between AI and ML?

A short series of notes for myself as I learn more about the AI ecosystem as of September 2025.

A short series of notes for myself as I learn more about the AI ecosystem as of September 2025.

A short series of notes for myself as I learn more about the AI ecosystem as of September 2025.

You can find previous editions of Interesting Links here.

You’ve got data in Apache Kafka.

This is a quick blog post to remind me how to connect Apache Flink to a Kafka topic on Confluent Cloud.

First up, allow me a shameless plug for my blog posts this month: Writing to Apache Iceberg on S3 using Kafka Connect with Glue catalog.

Iceberg nicely decouples storage from ingest and query (yay!).

Without wanting to mix my temperature metaphors, Iceberg is the new hawtness, and getting data into it from other places is a common task.

In this blog post I’ll show how you can use Flink SQL to write to Iceberg on S3, storing metadata about the Iceberg tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.