May 2025

Visiting PyGrunn 2025

Conferences are a great way to learn diverse topics in your field. That’s why I like to go to events like Pycons and last Friday, PyGrunn. PyGrunn is a Python event in Groningen, the Netherlands. I submitted two talks for the event myself. One of them was selected.

Here is a recap of the talks I attended and the stuff I learned, so you maybe get inspired to attend Python conferences and even speak at these events.

Keeping your Python in check – Mark Boer

Python was originally developed to make coding more accessible. Where at other programming languages you had to tell what type of data type your variables are, Python deduced this automatically. Good for beginning coders, maybe not so good for advanced data solutions.

Mark Boer has experience in strong typing in his data science solutions. He shared how you can ensure typing in different ways: in data classes, using Pydantic and named tuples. The talk assumed that the attendees already had experience with typing. I had not, so it was a lot to take in. But if I can review the video in a few weeks, I hope to catch on.

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By Marcel-Jan Krijgsman, ago

My experiences with agentic AI

Originally I wanted to write a blogpost about what data engineers are going to do with AI writing their code. But before I can write that, I need to share my experiences so far. Because from this you’ll get an idea where they work and where they lack.

This is not meant as a treatise of AI coding assistants and agentic AI tools. But here are some of the tools I’ve tried:

  • I’ve worked with VSCode and Copilot now for at least a year.
  • I regularly use ChatGPT and Phind.com for advice on programming tasks.
  • I’ve used VSCode with Cline / Roo Code extensions and LLM models.
  • And I’ve used Claude Code (which is not free, but there seems to be a trial amount of free tokens). Claude Code works from the command line.

The agentic AI solutions are interesting. They are quite capable to create whole Python projects based on your requests. But it doesn’t mean these projects will work right out of the box. Usually there needs to be some tweaking and restarting and checking results.

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By Marcel-Jan Krijgsman, ago