If you're reading this and curious: consider writing a duckdb community extension* or contributing to an existing one*
duckdb is becoming a kind of data superglue between a lot of data ecosystems (GIS, observability, analytics, lakehouses, object storage, etc) that don't talk to each other typically, and it's worth checking out in 2026.
I'm not convinced that is true. The JCB digger didn't put groundworkers out of business. A consultant that can get more done in a day is worth a lot more than one who can't. There is still skill required in wielding the tool of the day and that skill is marketable.
Meanwhile, people are in fact making actual money solving problems for others by building use-case-specific solutions. Perhaps you’re unaware of them, but they do exist. They prefer to operate off the radar.
This is something that can't escape people making such statements but never seems to be addressed. Perhaps it is unaddressable as the original statement is grounded in emotion not reason?
Thanks for your kind response. Could you guide further? Like businesses don't care about the tool/tech itself, how do I find and approach them, and for which niche.
> Like businesses don't care about the tool/tech itself, how do I find and approach them, and for which niche.
You probably don't realize this, but you're asking one of the hardest questions when starting a business, and one of the questions others are least likely to be able to answer for you.
"finding" a niche, and connecting to the business folks inside that 'niche' is hard, and is inherently a personal journey.
There's an old writing adage, "Write about what you know", and the same adage works in business: Do business with what you know.
Your question goes into another issue that you have to resolve when building a business: going into a platform specialization necessarily means folks know about that platform or they know they need you to solve a problem they have with that platform.
In general, there are two ways out of each problem:
1. Build an ecosystem with DuckDB at its center that solves a business problem that a particular niche cares about.
2. Build a reputation solving problems with DuckDB that would attract those that know they have a problem with DuckDB.
Honestly, best of luck here, becoming successful at business is hard if you're not already in tune with why folks buy and ensuring you're selling something they want to buy from you.
There is a theory called diffusion of innovation. The simple explanation is that there are 5 different cohorts of buyers. Early adopters, visionaries, pragmatists, conservatives and laggards. Early adopters and visionaries are risk takers, who will make bold moves to achieve order of magnitude results. This is called the early market, which represents 13% of the market. The pragmatists and conservatives make up the mainstream market which is about 70%.
In order to get into the mainstream market, you need solid adoption from the early market.
To choose a niche, you need to develop a solution that fits nicely into the buyers expectations for different types of market participants. There is the market alternative and product alternative. The market alternative is the solution that owns the highest proportion of market share. The product alternative is innovative tech that challenges superiority to the market alternative.
You need to introduce a solution that fits in between those participants to stand out.
To choose a solution, go to industry trade events and talk to people about high value problems that aren’t solved by current participants. That is the purpose of industry associations, to solve difficult problems.
Visionaries and early adopters love new vendors. They will champion you through their organization if your solution will help them meet their goals.
Been working on open-source projects involving storing and querying observability data (metrics, logs, traces) in parquet[0] and have been frustrated with the usability of Apache Iceberg … despite strongly agreeing and wanting to use an open storage format and catalog.
This makes Ducklake much more interesting for my use case, excited where this is going.
The Claude Code analytics space is really interesting to me right now as well, this is cool.
I'm coming at it from more of the data infrastructure side (e.g. send all of your logs and metrics to a cheap Iceberg catalog in the cloud so you have a central place to query[1]) but also check out https://github.com/tobilg/ai-observer -- duckdb popping up everything to make this interesting and easy.
edit: forgot to mention StackQL [3], which is somewhat similar but takes a SQL-first vs python-first approach. The IaC space is about to get a lot more interesting.
Anthropic ships an official plugin to create linters for you based on your Claude Code history or instructions, it’s great. You can vibe code your lint rules per repo.
Haven't had Amazon Prime for 2+ years and don't miss it, but would definitely miss my Costco membership.