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 specification. Doing so

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 within the

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 other types of web-based media in my Sphinx

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/) for providing a physical space for everyone. For those without any background, JupyterLite is a distribution of Jupyter's user

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 functionality](https://matplotlib.org/stable/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.pyplot.text.html). Here's

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 don't have to do this! There's a

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 because of

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

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) allowed me to include the full citation

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`