25 Years of Attending Python Conferences
Reflections on 25 years of Python conferences
Boom! Michael Droettboom's blog
Latest posts
How to think about LLMs for OSS development
A talk I gave at PyCon Colombia 2025
Profiling WebAssembly
Tips for profiling WebAssembly
Scientific Python in the Browser
An early report on getting the scientific Python stack compiled to WebAssembly.
Jupyter notebooks and version control
Presents an experimental alternative file format for Jupyter notebooks that plays nicer with version control.
Debugging Python C/C++ extensions in gdb
gdb has fantastic support for debugging Python/C extensions. It understands how to print the contents of PyObject * variables using their Python-side representation, and can even print Python tracebacks. These features are described elsewhere . I suggest visiting that link to see why this is so cool. This blog posting is …
VirtualBox on Mac OS X
I recently got a Mac Mini so I can start working on Macintosh-specific issues with matplotlib. Thanks again to Hans Petter Langtangen, the Director of the Center for Biomedical Computing at Simula for his gracious donation that supported the purchase. One of the things I'd like to use this machine …
matplotlib lessons learned
Jake Vanderplass has a very thought-provoking essay about the future of visualization in Python . It's an exciting time for visualization in Python with so many new options exploding onto the scene, and Jake has provided a nice summary. However, I don't think it presents a very current view of matplotlib …
Matplotlib in the browser: It's coming
UPDATE: I am now sharing my code in the mdboom/mpl_browser_experiments github repository, rather than in a gist. It's occurred to me recently that in my previous blog posts Part II and Part I , I was going about the problem all wrong. Getting the plotting logic running in the browser …
Amazon MP3 ends their support for Linux
I've bought digital music from Amazon for almost as long as they've been in that business. Their prices are very competitive, the MP3's are dog-standard and DRM-free so they work on every device imaginable, and, until recently, they have supported Linux. Admittedly, they haven't supported Linux well for some time …
John Hunter
We have lost one of the greats of our community. I first met John Hunter when he came to give a presentation about matplotlib at the Space Telescope Science Institute in 2004 (or thereabouts). I remember being blown away by how capable matplotlib was (even then), and stunned by John's …
Client-side Rendering in Matplotlib, Part II: The language blender
Note EDIT 2012-08-08: Added benchmarks in Firefox in addition to Chrome In the last post , I outlined some of the architectural difficulties bringing matplotlib's interactivity to the browser. In short, there's a big chunk of code that lies between building the tree of artists and rendering them to the screen …
Client-side rendering in matplotlib, Part I: Defining the problem
One of the big challenges that matplotlib faces as it enters its second decade is moving from a desktop app to the web browser client/server paradigm. This need has been known for a few years at least: SAGE and the IPython notebook are rich web clients and powerful ways …