In between biking, hiking, and crystal shopping, I've been pushing auto research on an XGBoost model using the tools taught in my book Effective XGBoost. Very cool to pair with an experimenter. Here's the progress.

Hanging out in Sedona this week. Going to be Vortex Coding heavily. Right now, I'm applying Kaparthy's autoresearch to XGBoost. Wish me luck. May the tokens be forever in my favor.

For my friends who are still using UV and might be a little weary about recent compromises to PyPi packages, stick this in your pyproject.toml. You can let all of those pip users find and report the compromises...

Spent the last 90 minutes coding a $100k replacement for an unmaintained project. Added new functionality, wrote tests, wrote docs, and added support for additional backends. Deployed to PyPI. Fun times. Corporate mode.

Teaching a weeklong advanced data science class this week. For "morning review" (you know that spaced repetition thing), we are creating an AGENTS.md file based on our learnings. Killing a few birds with one stone here...

Spent the last hour vibe coding a rewrite to a library that I'm teaching next week. It had an abandoned dependency. Used TDD to migrate the old codebase and push a new release, as well as precommits and CI/CD.

At Open Data Science Conference next month, I'll give two talks. My "Beyond Vibe Coding" talk will show participants how I'm coding more than ever now, but using my keyboard less than before.

I will be in NYC and Boston in April. Happy to meet up with anyone who wants to discuss leveraging their data and mastering AI.

Happy new half-keyboard day to me!

Since we don't know how to code these days... Happy 🥧 day

How developers will work a year from now: - Open source agents - Local-first workflow - NVIDIA models - Apple hardware 🤔

Big news 📣 Effective Testing (From Slop to Software) is out. It covers testing and uses the most modern and up-to-date tooling. Pytest, uv, pyproject.toml, ruff, prek, ty, and more. To celebrate the launch, you can get 25% off with code SOCIAL25. Grab it here 👉 store.metasnake.com/testing

A little behind the scenes... how the sausage gets made look into what training looks like from my side.

This looks interesting... github.com/kossisoroyce...

Fun week! Wrapped up a fun data analytics and viz course. Gave a talk about the state of AI...

Nano Banana 2 is the first model that can create a telemark skier in one shot. Kudos, Google!

Just in time for a talk I'm giving this week on running with agents completely locally... I got Qwen 3.5 (released yesterday) running on my NVIDIA AI DGX Spark.

Because the client is using UV, they now have access to the latest and greatest Pandas. Got to teach pd.col for the first time in a real course!

Teaching a fun Pandas/Viz class this week. Contrary to what you hear on social, understanding the fundamentals is still important. Hard to drive AI if you don't know what you are doing.

Busy day. Talked with three potential clients for AI/Python/tabular work. Fought with AI to refactor. Fought with AI to get my blinds to lower with my @corsair.com Stream Deck.

Spent a moment this evening vibe coding a voice-to-text command for my Mac/Stream Deck. Parakeet-mlx is awesome. Getting mic permissions to script on @corsair.com Stream Deck took an hour to debug.

Big news 📣 Effective Testing (From Slop to Software) is out. It covers testing and uses the most modern and up-to-date tooling. Pytest, uv, pyproject.toml, ruff, prek, ty, and more. To celebrate the launch, you can get 25% off with code SOCIAL25. Grab it here 👉 store.metasnake.com/testing

Python (and other languages I guess) folks. what does your AGENTS .md file look like with regard to testing and writing tests? 🤔

Getting closer! Incorporating final feedback from my wonderful reviewers.

The landing page is coming together...

Coming soon...

Excerpt from my latest book...

Folks, I'm ready for reviewers for my next book: Effective Testing with Python. If you are interested in helping me out, please submit to the form below. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

DuckDB folks: the “just make it faster” dream got a little more real. Sirius is an open-source, GPU-native execution engine (UW–Madison + NVIDIA AI engineers) that plugs into DuckDB as an extension and just posted a record-setting result on ClickBench. github.com/sirius-db/si...

I hope everyone had a great holiday break. I finally found some snow & enjoyed some much-needed time with the family. I should be announcing a new book (or 2) and another new project soon. My Professional Python and AI Lab cohorts are running next week on Maven. There is still time to sign up.

As we wrap up 2025 and enter the new year, I hope that this coming year is full of good food, excitement, and em dashes.

First impressions of the NVIDIA DGX Spark It’s quiet. So quiet that if you didn’t know it was on, you might assume it wasn’t.

Recent update for Effective Pandas 3...

Love this plot from my upcoming book "Effective Pandas 3"

Annoying ai-ism of the day (two times!)...

Just filing all the Pandas bugs... github.com/pandas-dev/p...

Fun week giving a talk on moving on from Vibe coding at PyBerlin. I also presented to 50 or so data scientists and engineers about best practices for Pandas usage.

Pandas 3 is coming out, and I'm updating the Effective Pandas content for it. It should be the first book that focuses on Pandas 3. Just filed my first bug for the rc. github.com/pandas-dev/p...

Tis the season. Sending out some swag...

Hope to see you at PyBerlin tomorrow. www.meetup.com/pyberlin/eve...

A different Thanksgiving this year. Celebrated with a walking tour of Berlin. No turkey, but some delicious Christmas market fares. Will be speaking at PyBerlin on Monday. Hope to see you there.

Image from my upcoming PyBerlin talk...

One of the best gifts you can give your team (and yourself) this holiday season is the gift of testing... My experience over the course of my career is that too few have received this gift.

One of the best gifts you can give your team (and yourself) this holiday season is the gift of testing... My experience over the course of my career is that too few have received this gift.

Got end-of-year budget left? Invest it where it matters most. Now is the time to level up your AI coding practices. The difference between “vibe slop” and professional engineering comes down to process, structure, and principles refined over fifty years of software development.

Fun day with the vibe and slop on the computer. No snow, so proceeded to come and slop in the mountains.

The 2026 Python Calendar notebook is available. I use it to plan my schedule, take notes, and brainstorm. Great team holiday gift! amzn.to/43AQB8L

I'm updating my Python 2025 Calendar for 2026. This "book" got mixed reviews. I made it for me. It has: - A Python 3 reference w/ area for taking notes on the side - A uv intro (w/note-taking area) - A 12-month calendar - 50 lined pages for notes www.amazon.com/Python-2025-...

Serendipitously had a 20-minute phone call with a Colombian friend that I haven't seen in 30 years (my son met her daughter...), which led to another 20-minute call. Small world indeed.