iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 12/02/2026

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...

github.com

[PERF] Replace np.column_stack with np.vstack().T by crabby-rathbun · Pull Request #31132 · matplotlib/matplotlib

This PR addresses issue #31130 by replacing specific safe occurrences of np.column_stack with np.vstack().T for better performance. IMPORTANT: This is a more targeted fix than originally proposed. ...

Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 06/02/2026

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...

tldraw.dev

Stay away from my trash! - tldraw: Infinite Canvas SDK for React

The tldraw SDK provides tools, services, and APIs to build beautiful whiteboards and infinite canvas applications with real-time collaboration and a powerful React-based canvas.

Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 03/02/2026

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!

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 22/01/2026

I had a little peek at it and 15% of the download is just pygments at around 1.2MB. I bet there's some low hanging fruit there.

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 21/01/2026

Reddit post www.reddit.com/r/homeassist... Blog post on this phenomenon sky-lights.org/2020/04/20/c...

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 21/01/2026

I saw a fun Reddit post today where someone asked why their solar output sometimes spikes above the expected curve. It sent me down a rabbit hole reading about how clouds block light in the middle, but refract it at the edges. Which can cause more light to be directed to the panels.

A graph showing solar power generated over 24 hours. The general graph is a bell curve but there is a spiky section where the output drops but also peaks above the curve.

$I diagram showing that the middle of a cloud blocks light, but the edges refract it.$

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 06/01/2026

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.

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 17/12/2025

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

Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 15/12/2025

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

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 27/11/2025

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.

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 27/11/2025

Any recommendations on config systems? In Dask we have our own, and I know someone extracted and forked it into a separate package called donfig too. But I’m always interested in what other projects are using.

I disagree. It clearly states them as guarantees, and people expect them to be guarantees. Then those promises get broken and people get upset. If you’re doing “best-efforts SemVer” you’re not actually doing SemVer. I wrote up EffVer for exactly this reason to more accurately describe reality.

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The best thing you can do is communicate clearly with your users. Tell them what version scheme you use, tell them what the numbers mean, tell them what to expect. Projects with 100 users have different goals to projects with 100k users, so do what you think is right for you and your community.

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 😂

Bridging the Corporate-OSS Divide: A Practical Guide To Contributing To Jupyter - Zach Sailer, Apple

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...

youtube.com

YouTube video by JupyterCon

Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 18/11/2025

One thing I was trying to do in this post was articulate why conda packages are more versatile than wheels. I'm not convinced I did a good job with this goal and want to keep thinking about this more. Are there benefits to conda packages that you feel I didn't include in this post?

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 18/11/2025

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...

jacobtomlinson.dev

Python package managers: uv vs pixi?

When I talk to people about Python package management in 2025 I see the following tools in active use; uv, pixi, pip, conda, mamba, micromamba and poetry. There may be others, but I don’t hear much ab...

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Reposted by Jacob Tomlinson

Dask @dask.org · 04/11/2025

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...

github.com

Dask Community Meeting November 2025 · Issue #432 · dask/community

The monthly Dask Community Meeting is on Thursday, November 6th at 10:00 US/Central. Feel free to add any updates you wish to share to the docs. Calendar: invite Video Conference: Zoom link

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 31/10/2025

Example > I like dogs >> A dog bit me once when I was a kid >>> Did you call the police >>>> Calling the police is a bit extreme >>>>> I have a right to report dangerous animals >>>> The police wouldn't do anything >>>>> They would have the animal destroyed! >> I like dogs too, I have two pugs

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 31/10/2025

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.

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 30/10/2025

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-...

thundergolfer.com

More Than DNS: The 14 hour AWS us-east-1 outage

A thorough review of a major cloud outage.

Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 29/10/2025

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

A pumpkin with a carving of a haunted house.

Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 17/10/2025

Dependencies are liabilities if they become unmaintained. Smaller dependencies are more likely to go dorment. Do you really need that 100 line dependency or can you just write it yourself? Do you really need that 10k line package just to call a couple of 20 line utility functions?

Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 17/10/2025

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?

Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 13/10/2025

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`

Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 10/10/2025

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

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 10/10/2025

Have you played the Black Mesa remake? It’s excellent!

Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 10/10/2025

I’ve not seen a head crab plushie for a long time!

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 09/10/2025

Maybe wait to see how buggy 3.14 is before committing it to skin 😂

Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 09/10/2025

They have a fun π themed logo!

Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 07/10/2025

Python 3.14 is out! Prepare your CIs!

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Reposted by Jacob Tomlinson

Esther Schindler @estherschindler.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

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

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 01/10/2025

Variations of this quote also often credited to Feynman, Einstein and Yogi Berra

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 01/10/2025

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

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 30/09/2025

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...

jacobtomlinson.dev

The Majority Of Your Users

The majority of your users don’t read your changelog. The majority of your users only upgrade to new versions when forced to.

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 28/09/2025

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…

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Written while staring at a half loaded GitHub issue for the tenth time…

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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.

Is it dog as in dig? If so that's pretty fun.

Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 25/09/2025

Often these sites are just a scam in the sense that they add an unnecessary fee on top of the CBP fee that you would avoid if you went directly to the US gov website. Hopefully it's not an identity theft scam too 🤞

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As a maintainer I don't mind if new contributors use AI as part of their workflow. But I don't want to be the first person to review raw model output code. The contributor should be editing/refining before opening the PR. If the AI code is beyond your ability to review then don't submit it.

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 24/09/2025

I checked off 10% of the items, not bad!

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Jacob Tomlinson @jacobtomlinson.dev · 24/09/2025

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.

Photo of a timer showing 20 mins remaining