Robin Moffatt, a data engineer, writes about data tooling, streaming, developer writing, and the effects of LLMs on engineering work.
HN commenters link it for his DuckDB walkthrough of a data challenge, with timings close to theirs, and for his post on AI slop on Medium.
"Turns out, stream processing was only really just getting started. In the last 12-18 months a veritable plethora of stream processing projects and companies have shown up, demonstrating that there is not only demand for it but also different approaches to take too." https://rmoff.net/2023/09/21/an-itch-that-just-has-to-be-scratched-or-why-am-i-joining-decodable/
Feel free to check out OSS Proton: github.com/timeplus-io/proton, and let me know any documentation/design need to be updated to make it a bit clearer
As a SQL-head, I enjoyed following along with Robin Moffatt's blog on doing the challenge with DuckDB. I got slightly slower numbers than he did (I have different hardware), but definitely in the same order of magnitude. He got 28 seconds to ingest the CSV, then 6 seconds to aggregate and calculate.
Maybe 2 hours of coding, tops
https://rmoff.net/2024/01/03/1%EF%B8%8F%E2%83%A3%EF%B8%8F-1brc-in-sql-with-duckdb/
There was recently this link talking about AI slop articles on medium
https://rmoff.net/2025/11/25/ai-smells-on-medium/
He doesn't link many examples, but at the end he gives the example of an author pumping out +8 articles in a week across a variety of topics. https://medium.com/@ArkProtocol1
I don't spend time on medium so I don't personally know.