Hi Reader, I'm in Vietnam for a few weeks visiting family. I'm enjoying it a lot. What I did not fully appreciate beforehand is how tiring it is to travel with a baby under 1 🫣. Last week, I climbed a mountain here with a bamboo walking stick. Here's me catching my breath at a viewpoint midway up. The place is called Yen Tu, one of those hidden gems most foreign tourists never hear about (you're welcome, and also please don't all go at once 🤣). I'd never climbed with a stick before. And wow,...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader, If there's anything I've learned over the past years, it's that you have to advocate for your own work. No one else will do it for you... And yet, I think most of you aren't advocating for your work hard enough (I have evidence for this!) Let's say you've put in many hours learning something new and built a data or AI project, like a data analysis on a real dataset, an AI automation app, a dashboard, a machine learning model, or whatever. You get it working. You're proud of it,...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Hey Reader, Last year I worked with about 500 people in my program on building projects with AI and Python. To my surprise, the biggest challenge of all wasn't technical. It was: lack of TIME. ⏳ As much as I don't want to become a productivity self-help guru... (because I'm not qualified to give anyone advice on this 😅) ...I feel like I need to write about it anyway. Because "I don't have time to learn this" might be the single biggest thing standing between you and whatever you're actually...
3 months ago • 6 min read
Hey Reader, A few days ago I had lunch with a former colleague from my data team. One of the smartest, hardest-working people I know. He was stressed... His clients had cut headcount (supposedly because of AI automating tasks). His line of work had matured, which meant fewer external consultants were needed. After the lunch with him, I kept thinking this: How do you future-proof your career when the ground keeps shifting? Honestly, the last 3 years have given me a low-level anxiety too. Big...
4 months ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, In the past year, AI coding agents have made me feel everything from "wow, this is genuinely magic" to "this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen." And a lot in between. I've tried many things: From full vibe coding (documented some of that on YouTube), to the more deliberate, step-by-step approaches. I've built random web apps, Python projects, chatbots, data visualisations,... I think right now, I have a much clearer sense of what actually works. So today, I'm going to share my...
4 months ago • 6 min read
Hey Reader, Let me describe a very "productive" afternoon. You sit down to start building your Python project. Then you want to check which framework to use. A Reddit thread says LangChain is the best, a YouTube guy swears by LlamaIndex, someone in the comments insists both are obsolete now. Oh, and which vector database should you use? And should you use FastAPI? Two hours later, you're totally lost, and you've made nothing you could call "progress". I know this dance well, because I've done...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Hey Reader, You can write Python. But why does building feel impossible? You've watched the tutorials. Many. Perhaps too many. And yet… when you sit down to build something of your own, you freeze. Does that sound familiar? Well, I've been there too 🤯. From what I've seen over the years, this is the #1 thing that quietly turns capable people into impostors. The good news is, there's a fix. So today, I'll talk about: The real reason you get stuck The exact workflow I use to turn an idea into a...
5 months ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, Yesterday I was in Paris for the AI Now Summit, hosted by Mistral AI. 1,500 people, from industries and AI builders and start-ups (Neo4j, Snorkel AI, Microsoft, Qdrant, to name a few). Genuinely interesting talks. Real use cases being shared. Only one unforgivable oversight: not a single French croissant in sight! 🥲 I'm still processing that... But, disappointment aside, here are my 4 key takeaways from the event. 1. AI is finally landing in conservative industries I've been...
5 months ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, If you're just starting out building technical skills, or maybe you're not as far along as you'd like to be, you might be wondering... When AI can do everything in the blink of an eye... is it still worth learning to code? Is it worth learning Git anymore, when AI agents can just write the command for you? Heck, is it even worth learning data techniques, statistical analysis, all of that? Like anyone who's deep in this space, I caught myself stopping to think about this seriously...
5 months ago • 1 min read