Half Stack Data Science

In the first episode of the new season, we discuss:
whether it's a good thing that we can produce more with GenAI,
how GenAI will force us to consider the purpose of education,
how we are supposed to develop wisdom if GenAI can just build everything for us,
how AI-written code introduces "cognitive debt",
and in a roundabout way we discuss whether GenAI will kill software companies
---
David’s book, The Well-Grounded Data Analyst is out! ⁠https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-data-analyst⁠
If you want to find out more, we have a whole episode about it: https://halfstackdatascience.com/s3-finale-the-well-grounded-data-analyst-with-david-asboth

In this episode, we wrapped up 2025 by reflecting on what we talked about on the podcast, where AI is and where it's heading, and looked ahead to 2026. We also discussed some of our favourite sci-fi books we read last year!

Links from the show:

- that YouTube video Shaun mentioned, "Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ
- our interview with Scott Hanselman whose blog post about Dark Matter Developers is always on our mind: https://halfstackdatascience.com/s4e1-meaningful-uses-of-ai-with-scott-hanselman
- our interview with Kirsten Hill who's empowered by AI to build the survey platform of her dreams: https://halfstackdatascience.com/s4e4-better-survey-design-with-ai-with-kirsten-hill

The sci-fi books we mentioned (and loved):

- The Three-Body Problem (book 1 of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20518872-the-three-body-problem
- Children of Time: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-time
- Sea of Tranquility: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58446227-sea-of-tranquility
- Sleeping Giants (book 1 of The Themis Files trilogy): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25733990-sleeping-giants

---

David’s book, The Well-Grounded Data Analyst is out! ⁠https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-data-analyst⁠

If you want to find out more, we have a whole episode about it: https://halfstackdatascience.com/s3-finale-the-well-grounded-data-analyst-with-david-asboth

In this episode, we spoke to Kirsten Hill.
Dr Kirsten Hill is a researcher, writer, and the founder of bisque — a survey platform that actually cares if you get good data. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, has led research for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and has worked with over 100 mission-driven teams on measurement & evaluation. This past year, she authored her first book, Ask Better Questions, a top release on survey design — and realized that writing the book wasn’t enough. If she really wanted to change how people do research, she had to build the tools that would make it easier to do it right. With real-time AI feedback, intuitive design, and built-in best practices, bisque makes it easy to create surveys that get you the answers you actually need.
We spoke to Kirsten about how and why surveys are often bad, why she believes the major survey platforms aren't fit for purpose, why she's building her own survey platform "bisque", how she's using Large Language Models to develop a working prototype, and what advice she has for other non-programmers who want to build things with AI.
You can find her on:
LinkedIn @kirstenleehill
TikTok @kirstenleehill
Substack kirstenleehill.substack.com

---
David’s book, The Well-Grounded Data Analyst is out! ⁠https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-data-analyst⁠
If you want to find out more, we have a whole episode about it: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/episode/5D0iDtQRh3tWiIhokrjz3x?si=AiX6YyRET16lnzXDlvdcfw

In this episode, we spoke to Richard Makara and Niko Korvenlaita who are CEO and CTO of reconfigured.
reconfigured is a journal app that makes it incredibly easy to capture and retrieve on-going notes, thoughts & insights. Richard is the CEO and he has led growth and built go-to-market data systems in high-growth scale-ups. Niko is a second time founder and the CTO. He has been building end-to-end machine learning applications since 2014 and has worked with Natural Language Processing since 2017.
We spoke to Richard and Niko about the common problems data professionals face, how data people create knowledge faster than they can capture it and what challenges that creates, why reducing the cost of note-taking to zero is so important for data work, how AI can help with the retrieval and structuring of ideas, and how to use AI in a product in a thoughtful and meaningful way.
Please enjoy our conversation with the team behind reconfigured!
Find out more about reconfigured here: https://reconfigured.io
You can also find Richard and Niko on LinkedIn.
—
David’s book, The Well-Grounded Data Analyst is out! ⁠https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-data-analyst⁠
If you want to find out more, we have a whole episode about it: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/episode/5D0iDtQRh3tWiIhokrjz3x?si=AiX6YyRET16lnzXDlvdcfw

In this episode we talked to Simon Willison.
Simon is the creator of Datasette, an open source tool for exploring and publishing data. He currently works full-time building open source tools for data journalism, built around Datasette and SQLite.
Prior to becoming an independent open source developer, Simon was an engineering director at Eventbrite. Simon joined Eventbrite through their acquisition of Lanyrd, a Y Combinator funded company he co-founded in 2010.
He is a co-creator of the Django Web Framework, and has been blogging about web development and programming since 2002 at simonwillison.net
We talked to Simon about his goal of building tools for data journalists, what he's learned about tinkering with, and writing about, AI models for years, his excitement about their code-generating capabilities, how to get the most out of all of these tools, and what generative AI tools have to do with pelicans.
You can find Simon at https://simonwillison.net
Please enjoy our conversation with Simon Willison!
--
David's book, The Well-Grounded Data Analyst is out! ⁠https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-data-analyst⁠
If you want to find out more, we have a whole episode about it: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/episode/5D0iDtQRh3tWiIhokrjz3x?si=AiX6YyRET16lnzXDlvdcfw