Make stuff! It’s my favourite thing to do! It literally doesn’t matter what it is or how good it is. Just do it for your own enjoyment.

Versioning software is hard. • SemVer makes broken promises due to poor orthogonality • CalVer just simply lacks information • BreakVer focuses on breaking changes only • EffVer tries to compress the complex space of impact into a magnitude scale and ZeroVer mocks the whole situation 😂

This talk by Zach Sailer from @jupyter.org's JupyterCon 2025 contains some great advice. Highly recommend watching it if you're an engineer who is interested in contributing to open-source or a maintainer who wants to encourage more contributions. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPRr...

For Python package management I use a mixture of pixi, uv and conda depending on the task I'm doing. I wrote up a long form post about the history of these tools, why each one exists, and why I settled on these choices in my workflow. jacobtomlinson.dev/posts/2025/p...

Reminder its the Dask Community Meeting on Thursday November 6th 2025 at 10am US Central time (4pm UTC) Come along and hear about what's going on in the Dask community and to share what you're building with Dask. Ad-hoc demos very welcome! github.com/dask/communi...

My favourite Hacker News comments are ones where someone says something innocuous and the top reply starts some argument that gets extremely heated. You scroll through the rage until suddenly the indentation drops back to the original comment with another reply that's also totally innocuous.

I enjoyed this writeup on the AWS outage from last week. Especially the parts on metastability and how when distributed systems fail they can get into a regime where they appear stable despite not doing useful work and therefore can't recover. thundergolfer.com/blog/aws-us-...

Five years ago I won third place in the NVIDIA employee pumpkin carving competition. Not sure I can top it to be honest! 🎃

I would love to have a dependency coverage tool for Python that tells me the following things: - How many lines is the dependency? - How many lines of the dependency do I actually call? - What overall percentage of the dependency am I using?

How my choices of Python build backends and VCS plugins have evolved over time: 2016 `setuptools` + hard coded 2018 `setuptools` + `versioneer` 2020 `setuptools` + `setuptools-scm` 2023+ `hatchling` + `hatch-vcs`

I’m definitely adding the Tron Ares soundtrack to my Coding Focus playlist!

Python 3.14 is out! Prepare your CIs!

I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is" -- Benjamin Brewster - The Yale Literary Magazine 1882

The monthly Dask Community Meeting is on Thursday, October 2nd at 10:00 US/Central. Come along and share what you've been doing with Dask. github.com/dask/communi...

When working on open source projects it's important to remember that most users think about your software way less than you do. The majority of your users are busy getting on with their own work. jacobtomlinson.dev/posts/2025/t...

My 5yo has been struggling with nightmare recently. We’ve all had pretty poor sleep in our house for the last month or so. I feel exhausted today after another night of broken sleep, but my Apple Watch just told me that my sleep last night was 98/100 so I guess I’ve got that going…

You know what’s worse than having no signal in a coffee shop. Having just enough signal that you convince yourself you can get some work done, but then everything half fails intermittently sapping all your productivity.

The length of my todo list is stressing me out, so let’s set 20 mins on the clock and see how may things I can check off.

I think this is a new personal record 1:30pm: couldn't find a tool to do what I need, started building it 2:00pm: pushed initial release to GitHub and PyPI and shared with others 2:10pm: someone pointed me to an existing tool that does exactly what I need 2:30pm archived my tool

These are too good @neal.fun neal.fun/not-a-robot/

@agoose77.bsky.social when talking to folks about EffVer I find myself quoting your point from SciPy that "Version numbers are a social contract and can’t exist in isolation". This is really helpful phrasing. Do you have thoughts on how I can update the EffVer page to communicate this better?

If the title of an article is a question, then the answer to that question is no.

The rise of coding agents means OSS projects need to ensure agents can parse their docs easily. The llms.txt standard defines a way to publish docs in markdown for loading into context windows. I made a quick Sphinx extension that makes it easy for you to do this! github.com/jacobtomlins...

Conda has virtual packages which allows you to expose system packages to the solver. This is commonly used for environments that use CUDA. However, I'd never thought about how this is fundamentally incompatible with lock files and portability. #SciPy2025 #pixi docs.conda.io/projects/con...

Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

semver.org effver.org calver.org

The recording of our tutorial from PyData London 2025 on GPU Accelerated Python with CUDA is now up on YouTube 🎉 www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnNw... @pydatalondon.bsky.social #python #programming #tutorial #gpu #pydata

Join Kamil Tokarski at EuroPython for "GPU performance or ease of use: why not both?". Talk: ep2025.europython.eu/3NB3PX

Interested in GPU accelerated Python? Data science? LLMs? Something else? Check out the latest @TalkPython episode with Bryce Adelstein-Lelbach and host @mkennedy.codes #python #509: GPU Programming in Pure Python talkpython.fm/episodes/sho...

Apple just moved their operating systems to CalVer. This makes total sense to me. They’ve released annually for a long time. Users will find it easier to reason about how old an OS release is. Releases will age more quickly and will encourage upgrading, nobody wants to be stuck on iOS 2022.

Loved doing this with @al.merose.com while at @cloudnativegeo.org Conference at the beginning of the month. Special shoutout to @maxlenormand.bsky.social for production assistance!

I'll be at @pydatalondon.bsky.social this weekend. On Friday we are running a GPU Accelerated Python tutorial where we will dig into CUDA development in Python with Numba, RAPIDS and more. Hope to see lots of folks there! cfp.pydata.org/london2025/t...

Dear everyone implementing a snooze function in their software If I snooze an item to a specific date and time then include that in the list of defaults next time I snooze something. It's likely I'm going to snooze a bunch of stuff to that point in time.

Microsoft's LightGBM (a popular open source gradient boosting ML library) just officially adopted EffVer as their version scheme! lightgbm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/In...

Many Microsoft sites don't work properly in Firefox these days. Azure hasn't for a long time, but more recently Outlook web keeps logging me out and refusing to sign in again unless I clear all cookies/cache. It's getting harder and harder to fight the pressure to switch to a Chrome based browser.

TIL that Python processes on Windows can only leverage the efficiency cores of a modern Intel CPU by default. You have to run the process as administrator for it to be able to use the performance cores. github.com/dask/distrib...

I think "funky junk code" is a great term for code you just blindly accept without really reading when vibe coding. @joshwcomeau.com www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/the-pos...

Yesterday I spent a bit of time running ollama in a GitHub Actions workflow to generate nice titles for automated PRs. I love the idea of leveraging LLMs locally in a workflow without needing to call out to a third-party API. jacobtomlinson.dev/posts/2025/g...

Playing with Cursor again today. It tried to commit some code and the pre-commit hooks kept failing. It hasn't added the correct type annotations and mypy was complaining. It tried to fix them a couple of times and when it couldn't it gave up and decided to skip pre-commit altogether 😅

Wow Marimo just overtook Jupyter Notebooks in terms of GitHub stars, and is quickly gaining on Jupyter Lab.

Dask is a Python library for executing distributed code on remote machines. Yesterday we got an AI generated CVE reporting that Dask allows remote code execution 🤷‍♂️. I should hope so, it's sort of the point! news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4343...

The 2006 version feels more like "my Neopets". I was starting to learn HTML around this time too, and spent ages trying to figure out how they achieved this layout. It was tables! This was before CSS layouts. You would put everything inside a table and manage your columns and rows that way.

"Programming library usage is usually taught by documentation. If the goal of documentation is to turn novices into experts, then the documentation must teach. You should think of your documentation as a lesson (or series of lessons) because that's what it is." stevelosh.com/blog/2013/09...

Today I learned why my markdown titles sometimes don't render properly. jacobtomlinson.dev/posts/2025/w...

I just used the “what’s that over there 👉?” distraction technique to get away from my 4 year old during a game of tag. It was so effective I feel super guilty 😅

Friendly reminder to everyone with transatlantic colleagues. The US changes their clocks this weekend, but Europe doesn't until March 30th. So get ready for three weeks of calendar shenanigans!

MacBook Air M4 conversations right now

Today is Day 1 of using a different coreutils command every day for 100 days!✨ GNU Coreutils are the built-in command line tools like cat, ls and rm. I use many of them every day, but there are many others I've never heard of. So I'm going to try them all! jacobtomlinson.dev/blog/100-day...