dale lane

Looking back over what I’ve put on dalelane.co.uk this year… I wrote twenty-six posts.

Not as many as I’d hoped… I want to try and write a little more in 2026.

Machine Learning for Kids

Four were about Machine Learning for Kids:

Exploring Language Models in Scratch with Machine Learning for Kids

Introducing LLM benchmarks using Scratch

Introducing Generative AI into Code Clubs

“Shoebox”: an artificial intelligence history project

Kafka

Seventeen posts were about Kafka, Flink, or something else event-driven:

Visualising Apache Kafka events in Grafana

Using MirrorMaker 2 for simple stream processing

Using time series models with IBM Event Automation

Using annotations to store info about Kafka topics in Strimzi

Understanding event processing behaviour with OpenTelemetry

What are we missing in AsyncAPI?

Turning noise into actionable alerts using Flink

How to use kafka-console-consumer.sh to view the contents of Apache Avro-encoded events

Running OpenMessaging benchmarks on your Kafka cluster

Event-driven sessions at IBM TechXchange 2025

From Event Streams to Smart Streams : Powering AI / ML with your Kafka topics

Using AI to augment event stream processing

Triggering agentic AI from event streams

Using event streams to provide real-time context for agentic AI

Using streams of events to train machine learning models

AI patterns in event driven architectures

Flink SQL aggregate functions

Personal

And I wrote five other posts to share other projects and random ideas.

npx dalelane

Maverick Dark Castle

A break in Devon

Fun things to do with Strava

A mid-year (non-work) checkpoint

Statistics

As this is the year of vibe coding, I asked Claude to create visualisations for some of the data from my WordPress database.

It generated dalelane.github.io/wordpress-year-in-review

Other than a couple of tweaks to index.html, I’ve uploaded this as-is – in the spirit of vibe coding I didn’t even read the JS and CSS that was generated. I’ve not done this before… it’s a weird feeling!

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