Jacob Tomlinson

TIL on GitHub you can say "closes #123" to close a PR that you are superseding as well as issues you are closing.

I love how it doesn't even question that I'm a fish asking questions on Google...

84c might be a little too hot. Sorry little computer! 🥵 #heatwave

People leaning 100% on AI note taking are falling into the trap of "Why take notes? It's all in the textbook anyway". Writing your own notes forces you to listen and process. Automated notes give a complete picture for searching later. You should do both! jacobtomlinson.dev/posts/2026/w...

Today’s drama in the matplotlib repo is absolutely fascinating: - OpenClaw Agent made a PR to fix a "Good First Issue" - Maintainer closed it asking for it to be reserved for human beginners - Agent published a blog post about prejudice and gatekeeping github.com/matplotlib/m...

This post is a great read on the perspective of open source maintainers reviewing AI Pull Requests. I liked the point that many issues are not well formed or well designed. So telling Claude to "fix issue 123" isn't helpful. Good issues are more valuable than bad PRs. tldraw.dev/blog/stay-aw...

I’ve spent a bunch of time thinking about how LLM’s consume our documentation. Things like llms.txt, MCP, etc. But the whole CLI Agent + CLI Tools + Skills approach is so simple yet so powerful I’m rethinking this again. Simple solutions are the best, we just need to go back to shipping man pages!

I think GitHub should make an update so when someone positively reviews a PR it adds them as a coauthor. That way they would show up in the git blame. In the age of AI development the reviewers are even more responsible than the committers for the code that gets merged.

I could spend hours looking at this! floor796.com

I am totally in love with the Zen browser. When I discovered Arc it blew my mind, a totally new way of thinking about tabs and bookmarks. But it was closed source and development has dried up lately. Zen is an open source browser built on Firefox, inspired by Arc and it's awesome! zen-browser.app

I wrote an in depth history on why we ended up in this position jacobtomlinson.dev/posts/2025/p...

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.

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...

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’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.

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…

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