Hi, I’m Chris Holdgraf 👋

Something that has bugged me for a long time is that MyST doesn’t have a lot of support for authors to write MyST documents more effectively. MyST documents have a ton of rich metadata inside them, but it has mostly been used for making the reader experience more interesting, rather than the author experience.

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, Brett Cannon demonstrates how the same principle applies to technical coordination in open source.

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.

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. Here’s a point that originally surprised me when I heard it:

This week was my first time attending the Linux Foundation 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, and so I tried to go into this meeting with the goal of learning how Jupyter’s new Foundation could be more impactful, and to understand the Linux Foundation space in general. In particular, I wanted to get ideas for where the Foundation should invest its first year of funding.

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.

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 reflection on the things that I think could be most impactful.

This year, I decided to nominate myself for the Jupyter Executive Council. 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.

I see a lot of individuals and communities in my network moving their primary social media presence over to BlueSky in the last few weeks. I’ve decided to give BlueSky a shot myself, and thought I’d share some of my rationale for why, and how I’m approaching it.