[ssp.sh] October Newsletter — Two Years Independent, What I’m Working On & 4 New Blog Posts
This is the Newsletter of ssp.sh.
Hi [subscriber]
It’s already been more than a month, and I promised to write once a month, so almost on time 😉. Anyway, below are some of the updates: first, the brain dump- what’s on my mind- then 4 new blog articles, and all the new notes and what I shared on social.
Two Years of Being an Independent Technical Author 🥳
Two years ago, I started my own adventure, freelancing as a data engineering author. Two years later, there are many more doing what I started doing, and a lot has changed with AI. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved so far, especially with such great partners I can fully stand behind. But writing is still something I love to do, sharing online not so much, and as long as you and others like to read something written by a person, I will continue to do so. Many studies show that if people know it’s AI, they don’t care to read at all. That’s not a surprise to me, the words are meaningless, even when the writing would otherwise be good.
It’s what I felt early on. It can still change, and the writing gets better, but the feeling when you know someone did not write that, when the stories told are all fake, that feeling of betrayal or irrelevance will never go away, I think. On top of that, I still enjoy writing, even with all the volume that gets generated every day, e.g. AWS restricted uploads to a max of 3 books a day in 2023.
Have a need for technical storytelling?
So if you have a company, or if you like my writing and want me to write for you, developer-centric storytelling around data engineering, BI, Obsidian, Neovim, and other things, ping me. Happy to chat.
Other Topics on My Mind
Other topics that go through my mind are: Christmas is coming (yay! the tree stands already 🎄), it’s getting colder and ready for the snow and ⛷️, I took my bike indoors, ready to Zwift (add me if you’re Zwifting, too), and I will have time to take some time off and think about what to do next or how the market has changed recently.
With all the recent Data Engineering Acquisitions, it’s apparent that A: the rebundling of the data platform is happening, and B: OSS is having a hard time competing with AI now that AI can just be pointed at anything and recreate a new version of it, see Photoshop, Office, and other copies that have been made. On the one hand, it’s great: I love all the new tooling that I get to use on Linux now, for free, with high quality, and building my own (e.g. FF10K, a new search plugin I’ve built, check it out if you use Obsidian, or also Trouble Tags). Still, it’s also harder for enterprises to keep their source code open if people just copy it, which is a shame.
But I still believe OSS is the way to go. As a business, I wouldn’t want to bet everything on a product that I can’t fix or update myself. Now with the power of agents, I want to improve upon it, and I don’t want to be locked in.
Content Update, Personal CRM, Website
Have you ever thought about taking notes on people? Or when someone tells you a great idea, where do you put that idea? I just shared a new note on Personal CRM that explains just that. Check it out, it’s the companion to Managing My Business with Obsidian (Business CRM).
There are so many more notes, and new blog posts (four of them, see below). There are also a couple of design and UI features added to the website. Check them out at the usual place, the Visual Changelog. Most notably, the Taxonomy of note types, with three levels for the notes in my second brain, from started -> growing -> evergreen, so you immediately see what level the note you’re reading is on. When you hover, you even see a nice git log history of words added/removed over the years.
Another one is a much faster Mermaid rendering engine called Pele Mermaid, introduced by Obsidian. I added it to the blog, notes, and book chapters.
Update on PoDE Book
Thanks so much to the people who reached out to me after the last newsletter and gave me advice, this helped a lot. And I’m one step further: I now have a clear vision for the book and its structure, AND a new name! It feels right. I can’t reveal it just yet. I need to fully revamp the intro, etc. for that, and I want to finish 3-4 more chapters before I publish again. But if you follow me online, you might have spotted hints of it in a few new URLs. So stay tuned.
What I’m Working on
I’m currently writing a couple of articles, one being on the new Typed Graph and Checked Types, and then I’m writing about how non-technical people can do analytics engineering with agents, without knowing anything about the underlying complexity. Is that possible? And there are two new, very interesting clients in the pipeline. Happy to share more about them later.
What’s on your mind these days? What are you working on? Anything that keeps coming back? Let me know, happy to chat or write about it. The best topics are always the ones that people actually care about, or struggle with.
And as always, thanks for reading, and no survey this time 🙂.
BR Simon
PS: Events: I’ll be at the FWDC 2026
A short update on conferences: I’m not at many of these, but if you are in Paris at the FWDC 2026 (Forward Data Conference), please ping me. I’ll be there too, happy to chat and meet in person.
Digest of recent Blogs, Notes, and Books
New on the blog
As Humans Write Less Code: Workloads Shift from Human to Agent Verification with Iterative Test Suites
Analysts, analytics engineers, and even business users are writing less SQL and Python by hand. They prompt an agent instead, and with the right context (data models, docs, a data catalog), the agent writes a decent query. Think of a BI tool shifting left and democratizing new context from data models and sources. This helps the agents better understand the business problem and write a more accurate SQL query.
With more advanced tooling that automatically reviews or generates queries iteratively, the agents’ output gets higher in quality every time. The models get better, and we can add additional documentation from internal Confluence pages or data catalogs, and it will get even better.
Data Engineering Is the Cache Invalidation Problem Ft. Josh Wills
In this episode, we dive into how much models actually matter: more like a preference, like whether you use an iPhone or Android, than their capabilities. We talk about bare-metal disks when running Kubernetes, then move to agents and how data engineering becomes like being an emergency pilot in a plane, and how we automate away the boring work with no more database migrations or unit tests.
We go into spiritual territory, where he feels in his gut whether a pipeline will work. Then we finish with where every data engineer or software engineer eventually wants to end up, as the field is evolving so fast: on a farm with beautiful flowers and no screen. This is interview #5. I hope you enjoy it.
Why We Need Yet Another (OSS) Semantic Layer
Most semantic layers come with a great declarative modeling language to define metrics and measures well1, but very soon after, you start building wrappers around the semantic layer that enable agentic work and context engineering, that work well with harnesses and interfaces, and that allow flexible queries at runtime, without the need to rebuild or recalculate the measures in YAML.
The other problem is that most data warehouse or analytics solutions basically lock you in with their proprietary semantic layer. The Open Semantic Interchange (OSI, new Apache Ossie) standard, making it possible to convert definitions from Snowflake to the dbt semantic layer, will reduce this, but all the glue code you build on top is still tightly integrated into that very semantic layer, or you might get some of the capabilities mentioned above from that proprietary software. So you might be using an open data format, or an OSS business intelligence tool to integrate measures into your semantic layer, but if that semantic layer is not open, you might still be locked in.
A Year of Linux, a Month of Omarchy Quattro—Part 3
This is my Part 3 about Omarchy, after using it for more than a year full time, as my main daily driver first on Lenovo ThinkBook 14 AMD, and now TUXEDO InfinityBook, for my business and personal use, replacing my MacBook Pro M1 after using macOS for 15 years.
I am sharing the newest updates of the Quattro version, which onboarded a whole lot more people. One would say it went a little viral. It’s everywhere on X and on socials. This is my take after using it for a month, comparing it to the previous versions, and showing what I like most, and maybe some things you should still be aware of.
From the Second Brain
Major updates
Obsidian Fast Find 10K Plugin (FF10K) — Fast Find 10k is a new Obsidian plugin I’ve built for my dream search based on fzf and Telescope form Neovim for preview style and fuzzy search, Omnisearch for smarter search, and… (new · 3228 words · 2026-11-04)
Claude Dashboards: The Jupyter Notebooks of Agent Age — Claude Dashboards were recently announced, and it goes to show that Dashboard are indeed not dead when Claude has now built their own services. (new · 1847 words · 2026-10-13)
A Personal CRM in Plain Markdown: To Remember Friends, Coworkers and Family — Everybody is talking about "LifeOS" or fancy "Personal AI setups", Nathan Barry on the pod with Dan Shipper says that he has an agent that gets each contact he tapped on his phone… (new · 1190 words · 2026-11-05)
Querying HackerNews with DuckDB directly (HackerTube, HackerBooks & Wikihack) — Reading Karpathy’s HackerTube, and then seeing a bunch of other apps on top of Hacker News like HackerBooks and Wikihacks: (new · 1087 words · 2026-11-03)
The Problem is not the AI Code, but Nobody Knows Anything Anymore — If we think writing code is dead, and AI is generating all codebases, I still think the bigger problem is people or full teams not knowing anything anymore about the system… (new · 984 words · 2026-10-04)
Writing with AI: What’s the Best Approach? — To me, AI writing always results in this: And If it’s read by a human it should also be written by a human. (903 words changed · 2026-11-04)
Obsidian Trouble Tags Plugin — My Obsidian Plugin called obsidian-trouble-tags to manage tags, todo’s and even tasks. (new · 751 words · 2026-10-22)
What I Learned throughout the Last Years Writing with AI — I’ve been writing long before AI, starting in 2015 to publish on this very blog, and then AI came, and I still write manually. (new · 562 words · 2026-10-02)
Smaller additions
Obsidian Local Graph: Is it Useful? — Many say that the Obsidian graph is only to show off. But in the initial phase, when I start a new article, it’s all I use. I’ll discover patterns and relations. (new · 446 words · 2026-10-22)
Vibe Coding: Think Slow, Cultivate Taste, and Build Fast — Vibe coding is the next evolution of Prompt Engineering, when you instruct your AI Agents to run autonomously. The best example is Claude Code, but there are more. (426 words changed · 2026-10-05)
Slow Living — Slowing down, and just slow living, is another important concept. Slowing down, being more present. (new · 389 words · 2026-09-18)
Second Brain: Note-taking in a Single App — A Second brain is in simple terms just a note-taking in a single app, but instead of organizing your notes into folders, you link them. It’s what Obsidian made popular. (361 words changed · 2026-10-29)
If You Start Writing Today, There’s no way to Know if You Can Write without AI — Writing in public today is all about trust and credibility—if you start today, there’s no way for readers to know if you can write without AI. (new · 222 words · 2026-11-05)
Every Database Migration is One Too Many — How many times have I had to migrate from Microsoft SQL to Oracle or to any other database, or switch the Cloud Data Warehouse or Cloud Providers, sometimes for reasons, and… (new · 237 words · 2026-10-06)
Pivot Table — Are pivot tables making a comeback in 2024? (233 words changed · 2026-10-01)
Having Taste’ as an Artist—Age of AI — Having taste is key in the age of Generative AI. It’s similar to a chef. A good chef will have the best taste and Creativity combined. (232 words changed · 2026-10-05)
On Writing. — Writing is a passion of mine and has become my job today for the most part, I’ve even built a company around it. (224 words changed · 2026-10-25)
Semantic Layer Measure Definition Examples — This list showcases different Semantic Layer definitions and examples. Example from Cube with SQL Expressions: yaml cubes: name: orders sqltable: orders (214 words changed · 2026-10-08)
Writing is Hard—and Meaningless with no Experience — Everyone who can write has a competitive advantage because not everyone can do it. (188 words changed · 2026-11-05)
Data Engineering: Trends and Predictions (2022-2026) 🔮 — Here I’ll list my predictions and trends, mainly for myself and to keep a record of what’s happened in the past. (185 words changed · 2026-10-20)
My Obsidian and Omarchy Themes — Here’s my Obsidian theme, and related Omarchy ones. My Obsidian Themes I created: My themes on GitHub: Obsidiankanagawa: A Kanagawa Theme for Obsidian (new · 172 words · 2026-10-25)
Social Highlights
Posts since last newsletter from Bluesky - but also shared on Twitter, LinkedIn, LinkedIn SSP Data, Mastodon, Substack and YouTube:
Top by engagement
New book day. — ♥︎ 10 · ↻ 0 · 💬︎ 0
How I query DuckDB in the Terminal. asciinema.org/a/663546 — ♥︎ 6 · ↻ 0 · 💬︎ 1
Most recent
Writing is a lonely sacrament. — ♥︎ 2 · ↻ 0 · 💬︎ 0
