In the past week I’ve added some more reading to my list, extended the library and hammered the credit card. Some of this has been in part to keep abreast of things as a result of being quizzed in job interviews.
PyCon AU 2026 held in Brisbane this week was a five day event for the Python community. With specialized tracks and dedicated tutorial and engineering days there was a wide variety of content available.
I previously came across an issue in my benchmarking work where I relied on the Latency Histogram section of sysbench output. On Linux it worked fine — I generally ran my workload there, so it never mattered.
In Curated MySQL Data Sets for Realistic Testing I described datasets assembled the manual way — download, schema, load, validate, document — over hours or days per source. This post is the follow-up I promised: what changes when AI assists the same workflow, using DuckDB as the target engine and GeoNames as the first example.