iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 08/05/2026

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.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 21/04/2026

The best feeling is when you burn tokens to REMOVE code

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 09/04/2026

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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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 03/04/2026

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.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 24/03/2026

Me trying to keep up with AI news while getting actual work done

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 23/03/2026

I was missing key metadata info on Claude Code, and I found this little gem last week: 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!

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 16/03/2026

"Can we add brand style and colors?" Old BI vendor: "I'm afraid that's not possible." Me: "Pick one."

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 05/02/2026

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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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 02/02/2026

OK so I made a mini movie on how to survive in data engineering. No bias. Just ducks. youtu.be/f0DDhKaZDDc plz netflix contact for collab

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 29/01/2026

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

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 20/01/2026

2026 paradox: We question whether LLMs are intelligent enough. Instead of deciding whether we’ll stay intelligent while using them.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 14/01/2026

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.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 05/01/2026

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.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 21/12/2025

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.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 09/06/2025

There’s a big shift coming in dev tools: their main users will soon be AI agents, not humans. Neon already sees 4x more DBs spun up by AIs. The question now: How do you make your tool AI-consumable? MCP is one answer—but new platforms & integrations will matter too.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 07/06/2025

Having more fun building a metadata registry for my personal website with all my content. 3 goal for this : 1. Bring public visibility to all my content (written / video) in one place 2. Make it easier to search through all of it (WIP)

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 04/06/2025

The best part of being active online is turning connections into real-life moments. Just hosted a sold-out DATA+AI meetup in Zurich at Google!

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 03/06/2025

I just had an epiphany, what Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Duck Lake have in common? Their logos are all blue. Like a lake... You’re welcome.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 16/05/2025

Since I teach #dataengineering, I figured my personal website should reflect that—it’s all about pipelines. I’ve automated most of the publishing workflow so the site acts as a central metadata hub, no matter where I post content online.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 08/04/2025

Today is a good day to be on Google Cloud.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 03/04/2025

Be careful what features you wish for. Before you know it, you’re stuck in an over-engineered data project. Been there, done that—because hey, it’s fun.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 01/04/2025

My goal has always been simple: to educate. To lower the technical barrier. To make data more inclusive. Even for ducks. 🦆

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 26/03/2025

You’re not a real data engineer until you’ve broken production

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 18/03/2025

I hereby declare today the official Data Engineer Day. Say thank you to this unsung hero of your data team Working in the shadows, always ready.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 16/03/2025

Irony: build a tool to curate weekly data content online, and only to have your own content surfaced 🤦 Latest data subTLDR is live : www.subtldr.com/newsletters/...

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 13/03/2025

Me: “Hey AI, can you code this feature?” AI: “Go learn it yourself, you lazy human.” Turns out AI isn’t here to destroy humanity—it’s trying to save it.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 09/03/2025

What if you could get a weekly TL;DR of your favorite subreddit—delivered straight to you? That’s exactly what I’m building with subtldr.com! 🚀 The waiting list is open, and there’s a demo live on the site—check it out! 👆

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 04/03/2025

Today is one of those special days that reminds me why I should continue contributing to the tech community—regardless of my employer or whether it’s free. After a few folks translated my content into Portuguese for the Brazilian community, some of my work is now being translated into Chinese!

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 28/02/2025

smallpond relies on ray and it distributes the workload at the partition level (manually specified). You have multiple of options for storage but the above benchmark is done on 3FS (DeepSeek's custom distributed storage framework)

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 28/02/2025

There are different levels of distributed compute compared to daft or apache spark

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 21/02/2025

Based on my highly sophisticated (and totally unbiased) survey, I can confidently conclude: clicking is painful. Stay tuned for more #databs questions.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 20/02/2025

According to the AWS Redshift team, 94% of workloads don’t exceed 10 TB. I look at my 4 TB SSD and wonder: Do we really need massive data centers for this? Do we really need distributed compute? Our idea of “big” #databs has changed, but most design decisions remain a decade old.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 12/02/2025

62% of my network enjoys living on the edge—parsing CSVs without a schema. 31% have spent one too many nights debugging inconsistent delimiters. 7% are still waiting for their XML parser to finish loading.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 09/02/2025

Normal people on weekend : do laundry, vacuum, wipe down surfaces, take out the trash, and tidy up clutter. Me : @duckdb.org

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 07/02/2025

Hey #duckdb folks, I'm currently looking for the next guests for Quack&Code (www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...) If you have a nice DuckDB (and/or MotherDuck) story you want to share, feel free to quack in my DM!

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 03/02/2025

DuckCon 6 AMS @duckdb.org conference highlights

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 31/01/2025

Folks are being really creative to add Delta write support to @duckdb.org

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 31/01/2025

I'm already quacking in Amsterdam, who's coming to the DuckCon organized by @duckdb.org ? #databs

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 09/01/2025

Are GitHub stars just vanity metrics? Most of the time. 1️⃣ Stars ≠ users. I’ve starred projects but never used them—bad READMEs lose users. 2️⃣ Stars = bookmarks. I’ve starred & forgotten, yet the count stays. 3️⃣ Buzz ≠ growth. Stars can be hyped or gamed For >1yr or 5k stars repo, they lose meaning.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 06/01/2025

Back online after a social media break for 2 weeks. All social media platforms should take a holiday and just shut down. The more you disconnect, the fresher your perspective becomes. It inevitably makes you more creative and productive.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 20/12/2024

The holidays are perfect for mixing things up! 🦆 I made a fun duck game to help you disconnect—and @motherduck.com's running a competition! 🏆 Hit the leaderboard to win cool duck swag. 🎮 Play here: game.motherduck.com

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 16/12/2024

I recently started using ChatGPT to get ideas for my video thumbnails and make sure they send the right message. Fun how creative you can be with some use cases. If an AI can't figure this out, an human probably won't be 😅

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 06/12/2024

One YAML file is all you need to start your #databs stack. With GitHub Actions, you get: - Free runtime (2,000 minutes/month) to run Python/SQL pipelines - Orchestration built in - Monitoring (email alerts on failure) No other setup comes close to this stack for going from 0 to 1.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 03/12/2024

The cool thing about creating one tech video a week for a year is that I can take more risks. "If this doesn’t work out, I’ll do better next week." Last week’s video didn't really work as expected. Fast iterations are great—but only if you’re open to self-criticism and learning from mistakes.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 03/12/2024

ABOUT TIME, MY EYES ARE BURNING

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 29/11/2024

People commenting on old videos saying I should have used uv... when uv is just 9 months old and that video older than that. YES OKAY I'M MIGRATING MY PROJECTS, JUST WAIT.

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 28/11/2024

Underrated feature of #duckdb : single binary with no external dependencies. This makes upgrading your Python project smoother - no dependencies hell. No more "Oh wait, Y relies on an older version of X, so I can't upgrade."

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 22/11/2024

I just tried this using openai: "An image of someone scratching their head while looking at a screen (viewed from the back) in a gaming pixel art style. On the screen, there's a duck and a database, with the text "pg_duckdb" written on it."

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 20/11/2024

An Airflow and a duck walked into a bar… Here are 5 things I learned from meeting Marc Lamberti, THE teacher of Airflow, in real life

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Mehdi Ouazza @mehdio.com · 15/11/2024

Two things that still give me nightmares when taking data pipelines to prod: Excel sheets and XML. What about you? #databs

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