Chris' personal blog!
Max Weber famously wrote that politics is "a strong and slow boring of hard boards." In [Why it took 4 years to get a lock files specification](https://snarky.ca/why-it-took-4-years-to-get-a-lock-files-specification/), Brett Cannon demonstrates how the same principle applies to technical coordination in open source. Python recently adopted [PEP 751](https://peps.python.org/pep-0751/) for lockfile…
I travel internationally a lot, which means I deal with a lot of jet lag. This post is a quick summary of a system I've found helpful, based on [this paper](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.00927/full). The basic idea is to shift your body's internal clock by timing your exposure to light, exercise, and melatonin around
This is a brief reflection on something that I've been hearing consistently from the Linux Foundation and its member projects as part of serving on the [Board of the Jupyter Foundation](https://jupyterfoundation.org). Here's a point that originally surprised me when I heard it: > Most foundations within the Linux Foundation network recommend
This week was my first time attending the [Linux Foundation Member Summit](https://events.linuxfoundation.org/lf-member-summit/). This is an annual meeting for all of the Linux Foundation member organizations and projects. I joined because of my new role [on the Jupyter Executive Council](./jec.md), and so I tried to go into this meeting with the
This is a question that I've been asked many times now that I'm serving on the JEC and the JF. I'm writing up a quick response so that I have something to refer back to and align my own thinking on. **How most Linux Foundation projects seem to be structured**. Linux
The Jupyter Foundation has a pot of money and it aims to use that funding quickly to support the Jupyter Project. But what should it use the funding _for_? There are many things to do, and not enough time or money to try everything. This is a brief brainstorm and
This year, I decided to nominate myself for the [Jupyter Executive Council](https://jupyter.org/governance/executive_council.html). This is a brief post explaining my rationale for doing so, the kind of service I'd hope to provide the project, and where I imagine the project moving. The [Jupyter Executive Council](https://jupyter.org/governance/executive_council.html) is the highest governing body…
Some quick thoughts on moving from Twitter/X to BlueSky and how I'll try to use social media after being burned once by Twitter.
On my journey to learn more about writing with [the new MyST engine](https:///mystmd.org), I built upon [my recent update to my blog infrastructure](./programmatic-myst-with-jupyter.md) and made some improvements to my blog post list. Here's what it looks like now: ````{note} Click here to see how it looks now :class: dropdown ```{postlist} :number: 3 ``` ```` Here's a quick rundown
While I've been [converting my blog to use the new MyST engine](./mystmd-with-the-blog.md), I discovered a useful MyST feature. It's not yet possible to [natively parse Jupyter Markdown outputs as MyST](https://github.com/jupyter-book/mystmd/issues/1026) but there's a workaround if you don't mind generating a temporary file. The trick is to _write to a temporary file_
Wow it has been a long time since I've last-written here. It turns out that having two small children and a very demanding job means you don't have as much time for blogging. But that's a whole different blog post... I've decided to convert my blog to use the new [MyST
Recently a few friends have reached out asking if I knew of any opportunities to work on AI-related things that also have some kind of pro-social tie-in. I think a lof people see AI as a technology with a lot of potential, but in an environment of companies that don't seem
:::{note} This probably doesn't work anymore I've since moved my blog to use [the MyST Document Engine](https://mystmd.org) so this example will no longer work on my personal blog. See [this permalink for the latest working version](https://github.com/choldgraf/choldgraf.github.io/blob/ae8ee9792c74aac72f46c645d19352abc439d572/blog/2023/social-directive.md). ::: I often want to link to social and…
I recently attended [FOSDEM 2023](https://fosdem.org/2023/), my first FOSDEM! I had heard of the conference before, but hadn't really looked into it too much. Fortunately, after some urging from friends and social media, I took a deeper look and decided I should join to see what all the fuss was about. Here are a
Sphinx is great because it has a ton of useful extensions that let you grow its functionality. However, a downside of this is that users have to actually _learn about_ those extensions and activate them manually. It's not hard, but it's a non-trivial amount of discovery work. One way to solve this is
This is a short post to demonstrate how to install packages directly from GitHub with `pyprojects.toml` or `requirements.txt`, including custom branches and commits. It will focus on `pyprojects.toml` because this is newer and there's less information about it, but the general pattern holds for `requirements.txt` as well. In `pyproject.toml`, you can specify
I recently attended [the JupyterLite community workshop in Paris](https://blog.jupyter.org/community-workshop-jupyterlite-e992c61f5d7f?source=collection_home---6------6-----------------------), here are some quick thoughts from the three-day event[^ack]. [^ack]: Many thanks to the [QuantStack](http://quantstack.com/) team for organizing this event, and to [OVHCloud](https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/)…
As part of [my `sphinx-social-previews`](https://github.com/choldgraf/sphinx-social-previews) prototype, I wanted to be able to use the [Roboto Font from Google](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto) in image previews. However, Roboto is often not loaded on your local filesystem, so it took some digging to figure out how to make it possible to load via [Matplotlib's text plotting…
As part of [the `pydata-sphinx-theme`](https://github.com/pydata/pydata-sphinx-theme/pull/1075) we have a few settings that auto-enable extensions and configure them on behalf of the user. It has always been mysterious to me how to do this properly **during the Sphinx build**. It's easy to configure things with `conf.py` ahead of time, but what if you want
I figured out a way to automatically update all of the git `pre-commit` hook versions at once! [`pre-commit`](https://pre-commit.com/) is a useful command line tool for running simple commands before every `git` commit. I use it to enforce things like [`flake8`](https://flake8.pycqa.org/) and [`black`](https://github.com/psf/black) in many of my projects. However, I find it really annoying
I often run shell commands in Python via the [`subprocess.run` command](https://docs.python.org/3/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.run). One thing that has always bugged me is that this required you to split commands into a list before it'd work properly. For example, you'd have to do: ```python import subprocess import shlex subprocess.run(*shlex.split("ls -l")) ``` Today I discovered that you…
Have you ever had a GitHub pull request show "phantom" workflows that never pass? This looks like one or more workflows that are in a constant **waiting state**, with a yellow status indicator, and that never complete. It looks something like this: ```{image} https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1839645/204134864-da2541f0-ff4f-4d9f-8c80-aa8c4437d8a0.png ``` If you run into this, it may be…
I was working on [the roles and structure section of the 2i2c Team Compass](https://compass.2i2c.org) and found a nifty feature in Sphinx that I hadn't known before. You can currently add labels to any section with the following MyST Markdown structure: ```md (mylabel)= And now I [reference it](mylabel). ``` However, there are no **semantics** attached to this
I spent a bit of time today updating my website after some changes in the MyST-NB and Sphinx Design ecosystems. Along the way, I decided to redirect `/posts/` to `/blog/`, since it seems `/blog/` is a much more common folder to use for blog posts. This posed a problem, because [the `sphinx-rediraffe`
For a while I've had a hand-crafted `.bibtex` file stored locally for [my `publications/` page](../../publications.md). However, manually updating local text file is a pain to remember, especially since there are many services out there that automatically track new publications. :::{admonition} Update! A [helpful suggestion on Twitter](https://twitter.com/temorrell/status/1594749942316208128)…
_this is an experiment at making my [Twitter conversations](https://twitter.com/choldgraf) a bit more useful and archivable over time. It's going to be a bit messy and unpolished, but hopefully that makes it more likely I'll actually do it :-)_ Over the past decade, cloud infrastructure has become increasingly popular in industry. An ecosystem
At AGU 2021 this year I was asked to give [a short tutorial introduction to Jupyter Book](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ2FHTkyaMU). The tutorial was 30 minutes long, and the session was fully remote. This posed a few challenges: - Tutorials almost **always** go over time - particularly if you're taking questions from attendees. - It is tricky to
Over the years I've had a recurring question from people who are in organizations both big and small: _how can we participate in open source communities?_ Whether it is because of altruism or strategic importance, many companies, research groups, non-profits, etc _want_ to be involved in open source projects (particularly large
I recently re-wrote all of the infrastructure for my blog so that it now builds on top of the Sphinx ecosystem! This is a short post to describe the reasons for doing so, and a bit about the implementation. ````{image} images/sphinx-logo.png :class: bg-dark ```` This is a great question. The answer to "should you
:::{warning} This probably doesn't work anymore I'm building my blog with the [MyST Markdown engine](https://mystmd.org) now, which means that all of this sphinx-specific stuff probably doesn't work anymore :-) If you want to see a version of this page that worked, [check out this file in…
Publishing computational narratives has always been a dream of the Jupyter Project, and there is still a lot of work to be done in improving these use-cases. We've made a lot of progress in providing open infrastructure for reproducible science with [JupyterHub](https://jupyterhub.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) and [the Binder Project](https://mybinder.org/), but what about the documents themselves?…
This is the second in a series of blog posts that explores what it'd look like to directly port the governance model of other communities into the Jupyter project. You can find the [first post about Rust here](https://chrisholdgraf.com/rust-jupyter-governance). **Note**: These posts are meant as a thought experiment rather than a proposal. Moreover, all the
As I've written about before, I [like Rust's governance structure](https://chrisholdgraf.com/rust-governance). I mean, who can't get behind a community that [lists governance as a top-level page on its website](https://www.rust-lang.org/governance)? Jupyter is currently in the middle of [figuring out the next phase of its governance…
Lately I've spent a lot of time trying to reduce the friction involved in deploying Jupyter Book as well as contributing to the project. Features are a great carrot, but ultimately getting engagement is also about lowering barriers to entry and showing people a path forward. Jupyter Book is a relatively straightforward project, but
Lately I've given quite a number of talks about the Jupyter and Binder ecosystems for various purposes. Before each of the talks, I make the slides available at a public address in case others are interested in following up with the material. For those who missed the talks (or the subsequent tweets about them),
I just got back from a week-long Jupyter team meeting that was somehow both very tiring and energizing at the same time. In the spirit of openness, I'd like to share some of my experience. While it's still fresh in my mind, here are a few takeaways that occurred to me throughout the
I recently had to beef up the continuous deployment of Jupyter Book, and used it as an opportunity to learn a bit more about CircleCI's features. It turns out, they're pretty cool! Here are a few of the things that I learned this time around. For those who aren't familiar with CircleCI, it
> tl;dr: you can automatically mirror the contents of one repository to another by using CI/CD services like CircleCI. This post shows you one way to do it using secrets that let you push to a GitHub repository from a CircleCI process. We recently ran into an issue with
In the last couple of years, we've seen an increasing number of organizations start to spawn products that take a largely open stack (e.g., the SciPy ecosystem) and wrap it in a thin layer of proprietary/custom interface + infrastructure. On the face of it, this isn't a problem - I really want people
I've had a bunch of conversations with friends who were interested in how to keep track of the various projects they're working on, and to prioritize their time over the course of a week. I thought it might be helpful to post my own approach to planning time throughout the week in case
How do open projects signal their "openness" to the outside community? This is a really hard question, particularly because nowadays "open" has become a buzzword that doesn't just signal a project's position to the community, but is also used as a marketing term to increase support, users, or resources. I was thinking about this
Recently I've been reading up on governance models for several large-ish open source projects. This is partially because I'm involved in a bunch of these projects myself, and partially because it's fascinating to see distributed groups of people organizing themselves in effective (or not) ways on the internet. Governance is tricky, because there is
Writing documentation is important - it's the first point of contact between many users and your project, and can be a pivotal moment in whether they decide to adopt your tech or become a contributor. However, it can be a pain to iterate on documentation, as it is often involves a lot
This is a short update on several of the conferences and workshops over the summer of this year. There's all kinds of exciting things going on in open source and open communities, so this is a quick way for me to collect my thoughts on some things I've learned this summer. Pangeo is a
> **NOTE: This is now a sphinx extension!** Thanks to some friendly suggestions, I've written > this up as a super tiny sphinx extension. Check it out here: https://github.com/choldgraf/sphinx-copybutton [Sphinx](http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/) is a fantastic way to build documentation for your Python package. On the Jupyter project, we use it for almost all of our repositories. A
Here's a quick (and hopefully helpful) post for those wishing to blog in Jekyll using Jupyter notebooks. As some of you may know, `nbconvert` can easily convert your `.ipynb` files to markdown, which Jekyll can easily turn into blog posts for you. ``` nbconvert --to markdown myfile.ipynb ``` However, an annoying part of this is that Markdown
Last week I took a few days to attend [DevOpsDays Silicon Valley](https://www.devopsdays.org/events/2018-silicon-valley/program/). My goal was to learn a bit about how the DevOps culture works, what are the things people are excited about and discuss in this community. I'm also interested in learning a thing or two that could be brought back into