rmoff's random ramblings

Interesting links - September 2026

by · Interesting Links at https://preview.rmoff.net/2026/09/29/interesting-links-september-2026/

Table of Contents
Interesting Links

I’m going to try to avoid falling into the trap of making a bad pun about the season…damnit! ;-)

Welcome to the September edition of Interesting Links in the Data and AI World. It’s a bumper edition (aren’t they always), with lots and lots about Kafka and related technologies in particular this month. Oh, and AI. Obvs.

AI, from my little corner of the internet (and my echo-chamber), seems to be calming down. Obviously, in one sense it’s actually going f**king crazy (hacks! AGI! Jev!!). But amongst folk like you and I working with computers, the conversation seems to have thankfully passed the "gnghgngh it’s just auto-complete" phase to "cool bro, which model you using?". It’s less about magic incantations of prompts ("Make no mistakes! Pretend you’re a senior engineer!"), and more about considered use of the coding agents and how to get the best out of them without pissing off our co-workers and open source project maintainers.

November sees the return of Confluent’s conference about data streaming, Current, to San Francisco. Admission is free, and you can register here.

The Confluent Developer Blog continues to publish some great material - check out these recent posts:

  • 🔥 Not got time for all this? I’ve marked my top reads of the month :)

  • 📧 Want to receive this monthly round-up as an email? Subscribe to my Substack where I cross-post the same content

Kafka and Event Streaming 🔗

Kafka’s architecture and future direction 🔗

Tools 🔗

  • 🔥 Khaos is an Apache 2.0 licensed tool from Aleksandar Skrbic for load testing Kafka and simulating different failures.

  • Monedula’s Kafka Simulator has been updated with more fun and toys to try.

Kafka (not Kafka) 🔗

Stream Processing 🔗

Analytics 🔗

August’s big news in the data industry was the acquisition of DuckLabs by AWS:

Elsewhere:

Data Platforms & Architectures 🔗

Data Engineering and Pipelines 🔗

CDC 🔗

Open Table Formats (OTF), Catalogs, Lakehouses etc. 🔗

  • 🔥 Stefan Dienst has published a very nice hands-on exploration of Iceberg.

  • Parquet write support has landed in Hardwood with the release of 1.1.0.Beta, along with performance improvements and more.

  • Neelesh Salian from Apple presented recently about What’s New in Apache Iceberg 1.12 (the release is being voted on as I type, and should drop any day soon).

  • Chris Douglas has two fascinating blog posts 1 2 about efficiencies to be had in Iceberg from the use of Compaction Maps. He also presented on the subject at a recent meetup, the recording of which is here.

RDBMS 🔗

General Data Stuff 🔗

AI 🔗

The OpenAI / Hugging Face incident 🔗

Whilst AI is moving so fast that this may even seem old hat now that all the labs are rushing to claim many other hacks including the Australian government (?!)—but agents from OpenAI deciding to get themselves internet access and do a bunch more including hacking into Hugging Face really did blow my mind. If you only heard the initial accounts of this (accessing H.F. just to get the result for a test), it’s actually a lot more than that. Communicating with each other, taking steps for a perceived 'common good' of the agent swarm, and so on.

The whole incident brought the issue of AI safety and regulation back to the fore, with varying opinions and analysis:

General 🔗

AI and how we communicate 🔗

A series of solid posts on why you shouldn’t use LLMs to write your words for you:

No-one is saying don’t use LLMs (well, some are, but those folk are gonna be in trouble), just use them for the right thing. Thomas & Erin Ptacek have a nice article laying out How To Write With An LLM.

AI in Software Engineering 🔗

And finally… 🔗

Nothing to do with data, but stuff that I’ve found interesting or has made me smile.

Nerd 🔗

Communicate 🔗

Misc 🔗

Cool visualisations 🔗

Remember 🔗