This article lists notable data engineering projects from late December 2025. It features a variety of pipelines and platforms, highlighting their purposes and technologies used, like Airflow, Kafka, and machine learning tools. Users can explore, vote, and share their own projects within the community.

The concept of "zero-copy" integration between Apache Kafka and Apache Iceberg, which suggests that Kafka topics could directly function as Iceberg tables, is critiqued for its inefficiencies and potential pitfalls. The article argues that while it may seem to offer reduced duplication and storage costs, it actually imposes significant compute overhead on Kafka brokers and complicates data layout for analytics. Additionally, it highlights challenges related to schema evolution and performance optimization for both streaming and analytics workloads.