Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Jeff Hollan, director of product at Snowflake, joins Ryan to discuss the role that data plays in making AI and AI agents better. Along the way, they discuss how a database leads to an AI platform, Snowflake’s new data marketplace, and the role data will play in AI agents. 

Episode notes:

Snowflake provides a fully-managed data platform that developers can build AI apps on. 

We’re happy to have Stack Exchange data available on the Snowflake Marketplace.  

Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

Congrats to Timeless for throwing a Lifejacket to Using pandas to read HTML.

TRANSCRIPT

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Topics covered in this episode:

• * pandas is getting pd.col expressions*
• * Cline, At-Cost Agentic IDE Tooling*
• * uv cheatsheet*
• Ducky Network UI
• Extras
• Joke

Watch on YouTube

About the show

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Brian #1: pandas is getting pd.col expressions

• Marco Gorelli
• Next release of Pandas will have pd.col(), inspired by some of the other frameworks
  • I’m guessing Pandas 2.3.3? or 2.4.0? or 3.0.0? (depending on which version they bump?)
• “The output of pd.col is called an expression. You can think of it as a delayed column - it only produces a result once it's evaluated inside a dataframe context.”
• It replaces many contexts where lambda expressions were used

Michael #2: Cline, At-Cost Agentic IDE Tooling

• Free and open-source
• Probably supports your IDE (if your IDE isn’t a terminal)
  • VS Code
  • VS Code Insiders
  • Cursor
  • Windsurf
  • JetBrains IDEs (including PyCharm)
• You pick plan or act (very important)
• It shows you the price as the AI works, per request, right in the UI

Brian #3: uv cheatsheet

• Rodgrigo at mathspp.com
• Nice compact cheat sheet of commands for
  • Creating projects
  • Managing dependencies
  • Lifecycle stuff like build, publish, bumping version
  • uv tool (uvx) commands
  • working with scripts
  • Installing and updating Python versions
  • plus venv, pip, format, help and update

Michael #4: Ducky Network UI

• Ducky is a powerful, open-source, all-in-one desktop application built with Python and PySide6.
• It is designed to be the perfect companion for network engineers, students, and tech enthusiasts, combining several essential utilities into a single, intuitive graphical interface.
• Features
  • Multi-Protocol Terminal: Connect via SSH, Telnet, and Serial (COM) in a modern, tabbed interface.
  • SNMP Topology Mapper: Automatically discover your network with a ping and SNMP sweep. See a graphical map of your devices, color-coded by type, and click to view detailed information.
  • Network Diagnostics: A full suite of tools including a Subnet Calculator, Network Monitor (Ping, Traceroute), and a multi-threaded Port Scanner.
  • Security Toolkit: Look up CVEs from the NIST database, check password strength, and calculate file hashes (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512).
  • Rich-Text Notepad: Keep notes and reminders in a dockable widget with formatting tools and auto-save.
  • Customizable UI: Switch between a sleek dark theme and a clean light theme. Customize terminal colors and fonts to your liking.

Extras

Brian:

• Where are the cool kids hosting static sites these days?
  • Moving from Netlify to Cloudflare Pages - Will Vincent from Feb 2024
  • Traffic is a concern now for even low-ish traffic sites since so many bots are out there
  • Netlify free plan is less than 30 GB/mo allowed (grandfathered plans are 100 GB/mo)
  • GH Pages have a soft limit of 100 GB/mo
  • Cloudflare pages says unlimited

Michael:

• PyCon Brazil needs some help with reduced funding from the PSF
  • Get a ticket to donate for a student to attend (at the button of the buy ticket checkout dialog)
• I upgraded to macOS Tahoe
  • Loving it so far.
  • Only issue I’ve seen so far has been with alt-tab for macOS

Joke: Hiring in 2025 vs 2021

• 2021:
  • “Do you have an in-house kombucha sommelier?”
  • “Let’s talk about pets, are you donkey-friendly?”, “Oh you think this is a joke?”
• 2025:
  • “Round 8/7”
  • “Out of 12,000 resumes, the AI picked yours”
  • “Binary tree? Build me a foundational model!”
  • “Healthcare? What, you want to live forever?”

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) OpenAI tells us how people use ChatGPT 2) Practical guidance is the top use of ChatGPT 3) Is generative AI actually a threat to search given the use cases? 4) OpenAI has a very broad definition of 'doing' or agent work 5) The hidden impact of AI 'decision support' in the economy 6) People trust AI bots massively - is that bad? 7) ChatGPT's massive growth 8) Anthropic shares Claude's economic uses 9) Automation is surpassing augmentation for AI in work 10) Will Meta's AI glasses hit? 11) Can Jimmy Kimmel build an audience off-ABC? 12) Will the next Jimmy Kimmel be a youtube/rpodcaster?

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Three Faces Of Generative AI: https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/the-three-faces-of-generative-ai

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Episode overview: April Long spent two years fighting reality. The co-founder and CEO of "Afro-Asia Cross-border payment infrastructure" startup Pyxis was so determined to serve Africa's small merchants - the "bottom of the pyramid" she'd read about in Harvard Business Review - that she nearly bankrupted her fintech ignoring the bulk traders actually driving Africa-China trade. In conversation with Andile Masuku, Long delivers uncomfortable truths about impact theatre versus impact reality. Her journey from receiving President Xi Jinping in Tanzania at 23 to finally accepting who actually moves goods between Africa and China at 35 offers a masterclass in entrepreneurial humility. Key insights: -On impact delusions: "I used to defend, I was like, 'No, no, no, no, no. It's that you don't get to this market.'" Long admits she lived in a bubble, desperately wanting to believe SMEs were ready for direct China trade. The truth? "90% of African trade is still happening in a more traditional way" - through the aggregators she'd dismissed as insufficiently mission-driven. - On the cost of stubbornness: Despite zero demand after six months embedded in Nairobi's wholesale markets, Long refused to pivot. "I was quite stubborn. I was like, no, we have to work with SMEs." The result: burning 90% of her time on unprofitable small traders whilst the 10% spent on bulk traders kept her company alive. - On acceptance as strategy: "The future is not here yet. And we need to build the future by serving who is there currently." Long's breakthrough came from accepting that Chinese trading companies scaling from $0 to IPO in a decade were the real infrastructure of Africa-China trade - not the romantic vision of empowered individual merchants. - On being un-fundable forcing clarity: Without millions to burn on market education, Long had to face reality faster than her funded competitors. "I'm grateful I didn't have money to burn, or else I could have burned myself." Notable moments: 1. The marketplace wake-up call: Walking through Nairobi's famous Gikomba market as a Chinese woman, traders shouted "China, China, what are you selling?" They wanted products, not payment rails. Long built the wrong solution for the right market. 2. The Eric Simanis paradox: The same Harvard Business Review article that inspired her Africa move warned against oversimplifying "bottom of pyramid" markets. Long spent years learning what she'd initially misread. 3. The three Aprils: Long describes fragmenting into Chinese April, Western April, and African April - "these narratives are so vastly different" that keeping them separate became exhausting. Building Pyxis became about reconciling these selves. The aggregator revelation: Long's former Standard Chartered clients - the Chinese trading companies she'd tried to convince to take loans in 2015 - transformed from traders to manufacturers to near-IPO giants in under a decade. They were the real story of Africa-China trade, moving containers whilst she chased individual merchants moving parcels. "These Chinese trading companies making impacts in Africa, making products super affordable... because of the storytelling, they are not recognised." Her role shifted from trying to bypass them to helping them operate more efficiently. The present tense: Long's current focus on settlement infrastructure for bulk traders isn't the sexy SME empowerment story she'd imagined. But with a 12-person team across four countries and actual revenue, she's building what the market needs today whilst preparing for the SME future she still believes will come. Image credit: Pxyis

Ryan welcomes Sebastian Gierlinger, VP of Engineering at Storyblok, to talk about how headless content management systems (CMS) fit into an increasingly componentized software landscape. They run through the differences between headless and traditional CMS systems (and databases), prototyping and security concerns, and how a team building distributed systems can get that precious velocity by decoupling their content from its rendering. 

Episode notes:

Storyblok provides a headless CMS they say is made for humans but built for the AI-driven era. 

Want to learn more about CMS design? Check out other pieces we’ve done with CMS providers Drupal and Builder.io. 

Connect with Sebastian on LinkedIn or Twitter. 

Congrats to Populist badge winner Răzvan Flavius Panda for dropping an amazing answer on How do I change the maintenance database for Postgres?.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aaron Levie is the CEO of Box. Levie joins Big Technology to discuss the reports that a vast majority of businesses are not getting a return on their AI investments. Levie shares his takeaways from the reports, gives a rebuttal, and discusses the reality on the ground. Stay tuned for the second half where we separate hype from reality in the AI agent conversation. Tune in for a wide-ranging, post-Boxworks deep dive on where AI is heading in the coming years.

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Jens Neuse grew up in Germany, originally planning to be a carpenter. In his 2nd year as an apprentice, he was in a motorcycle wreck that thrust him into a process of surgery and healing. Eventually, he decided he wouldn't be doing carpentry, and got into sysadmin work. Once he got bored with this, he moved into startups, learned how to code, and starting digging into programming, API's and eventually - GraphQL federation. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 young kids. He loves to sit ski on the mountain - which is the coolest carbon fiber chair on a ski, where you steer with your knees and hips.

After chasing building a better Apollo, Jens and his team ran into a point where their prior product and company was doomed to go under. When they accepted this fact, they started to think about what people actually wanted - and started to dig into the federation of GraphQL.

This is the creation story of Wundergraph.

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