As a data engineering person I can say that this is a great write up!
Some thoughts:
A "bubbling" topic right now is conversational analytics (i.e. talk to your data). There has been an explosion of tools in the last 6 months. YC is backing one too: https://getnao.io/
I feel like pandas is also somewhat frowned upon, the industry has moved on from that. Most SQL tools can now do everything that we could only do with pandas.
In my network everyone is talking about DuckDB. As long as you are under a 1TB it will have everything you need. I think most people should start with that vs locking themselves into something like Snowflake
I love what I am hearing.
I still see a lot of engineers using pandas, but it is such a horrible tools. You usually find an abandoned notebook with 100s of ”df_final_2” with sequential wrangling, making it impossible to understand what’s happening. Notebooks are also horrible for the same reason IMO.
With chat-your-data you have Hex, Claude + MCP, snowflake, Databricks etc… everyone’s in on it.
Just to add, people in my network have been talking about polars (as an alternative to pandas) and other dataframe libraries. They're much easier to use now thanks to the Narwhals compatibility layer (for example, Narwhals was recently added as a dependency to scikit-learn).
What's different between Narwhals and Ibis? Why does the former exist when the latter has already (struggled along) existing for a while? Narrower scope / benefit of hindsight? No support for "cloud" data frames like Ray and Spark?
Also Pandas is very much still a great tool and it's only getting better. It has some fundamental limitations that are relevant for processing bigger datasets or running things with higher performance. But it's still my preferred data frame for interactive day-to-day work. I only switch to Polars (or DuckDB) when I want to maximize performance.
There is a slide about Narwhals and Ibis here (a recording of a talk from PyData Berlin 2025): https://youtu.be/qOJiQtqI348?t=2496
TL;DR: It doesn't have to be Narwhals vs. Ibis because Narwhals supports Ibis.
I let agents write my code but not my commits. I think I gain some understanding by doing `git diff` and then writing the (brief) commit message myself.
Örebropartiet is like the weirdest party in Sweden. It's named after "Örebro", a Swedish city with 125k population. The party's founder, Markus Allard, used to be far left politician before turning far right.
Their party program is all over the place. They stand for free dental care, direct democracy and deporting immigrants.
Marcus is also known for profanity and foul language in council meetings.
An oddity in Swedish politics is that if a local party manages to get 12% of the votes in a constituency they are eligible for getting a seat in parliament, and can skip the regular 4% popular vote rule.
Örebropartiet actually has a chance to get into national government next election (Fall 2026) since their local support is quite strong. Times are weird
Some thoughts:
A "bubbling" topic right now is conversational analytics (i.e. talk to your data). There has been an explosion of tools in the last 6 months. YC is backing one too: https://getnao.io/
I feel like pandas is also somewhat frowned upon, the industry has moved on from that. Most SQL tools can now do everything that we could only do with pandas.
In my network everyone is talking about DuckDB. As long as you are under a 1TB it will have everything you need. I think most people should start with that vs locking themselves into something like Snowflake
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