Grab your coffee. Here are this week’s highlights.

📅 Today’s Picks

Quarkdown: Build LaTeX-Quality Docs with Just Markdown

Problem

LaTeX produces beautiful academic papers, but its verbose syntax and nested environments make even simple layouts painful to write.

Solution

Quarkdown generates the same professional paged output using clean Markdown syntax you already know.

Key features:

• Write once, export as paged documents, presentation slides, or websites
• Define reusable functions with conditionals and loops inside your documents
• Embed Mermaid diagrams and charts without external tools
• Live preview in VS Code as you type

Ibis: One Python API for 22+ Database Backends

Problem

Running queries across multiple databases often means rewriting the same logic for each backend’s SQL dialect. A query that works in DuckDB may require syntax changes for PostgreSQL, and another rewrite for BigQuery.

Solution

Ibis removes that friction by compiling Python expressions into each backend’s native SQL. Swap the connection, and the same code runs across 22+ databases.

Key features:

• Write once, run on DuckDB, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Snowflake, and 18+ more
• Lazy execution that builds and optimizes the query plan before sending it to the database
• Intuitive chaining syntax similar to Polars

📚 Latest Deep Dives

Portable DataFrames in Python: When to Use Ibis, Narwhals, or Fugue – Write your DataFrame logic once and run it on any backend. Compare Ibis, Narwhals, and Fugue to find the right portability strategy for your Python workflow.

☕️ Weekly Finds

graphiti [LLM] – Build real-time, temporally-aware knowledge graphs for AI agents with automatic entity and relationship extraction

doris [SQL] – High-performance MPP analytics database with MySQL compatibility that handles real-time ingestion and sub-second queries at scale

smallpond [Data Processing] – Lightweight distributed data processing framework by DeepSeek that scales DuckDB to PB-scale datasets using Ray

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