30 Dec 2023

Year 2023 Review! 🎭

Work · Life

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A walk along the river Thames on my 2 hour journey to the Riverside Arts center for theatre rehearsals.

After writing the year 2022’s review blog post in December 2023, my only expectation for the rest of 2023 has been to pen this one before the onset of 2024 as I had a hard time recalling the events of the previous year. Let’s try to recall whatever I can, starting with my work summary.

Work

In 2023 I worked for Quansight throughout the year. Here are some of the projects I contributed to:

Papyri

Papyri is a set of tools to build, publish, install and render documentation within IPython and Jupyter. Papyri parses docs either via tree-sitter or by numpy doc. Those parsed docs are represented as hand-crafted custom AST, and then it’s rendered as html and also in Jupyter Lab. I had the chance to work on its AST, the idea was to adopt MyST’s spec as it’s more widely adopted by the community and has better out of the box support for rendering. Below is a quick example of the raw spec displayed in JupyterLab (which will eventually be formatted properly for better readability):

Pyflyby

Pyflyby is a set of Python programming productivity tools such as

• autoimporter: automatically imports symbols when needed.
• tidy-imports: adds missing ‘import’s, removes unused ‘import’s, and also reformats import blocks.
• reformat-imports: reformats import blocks.

I worked mostly on bug fixes in pyflyby.

Nebari

Nebari is an open source data science platform for various cloud providers. This year I spent some time on Nebari writing integration testing of the deployed Nebari to increase confidence in release and testing. I also worked on bug fixes and adding support for things like JupyterLab Pioneer for audit purposes.

JHub App Launcher

JupyterHub Apps Launcher is a generalized server launcher, to launch anything like say a Flask Server, FastAPI server or a Panel Dashboard, Streamlit using JupyterHub spawner. I worked on writing it from scratch taking inspiration from CDSDashboards. This will be later added to Nebari. Below is a quick demo:

Personal Work

Cirun

I spent time improving cirun.io this year and managed to make it a profitable business. I also managed to help conda-forge (a community-led recipes, infrastructure and distributions for Conda) use GPU CI for building packages via access controls runners created on demand by cirun on OpenStack running on a baremetal machine, a details blog post is coming soon.

Below is a GitHub Actions workflow with 14 jobs, running on 6 cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, DigitalOcean, Oracle, OpenStack):

Codecinema

It was a little side project to take beautiful snapshots and gif/mp4 of code snippets. Try it out here: codecinema.io

Personal Life

Theatre

I was part this play called Maskerade, it’s Stephen Briggs adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s novel. I played a few characters named “Tommy Cripps” and “Kevin”. It was the second theatre show I have been part of and first non musical play. It was quite a satisfying experience being part of this. It was really an excellent learning experience.

Misc

• Ran 100 Km over the year 🏃(rookie number, but enough to get me started for the next year).
• Saw 3 games of the Cricket World Cup 2023 in India, two of which I managed to get the tickets outside the stadium:
  • India vs Afghanistan
  • India vs New Zealand
  • England vs Afghanistan

Probably one of the most scenic cricket grounds in the world

• Travelled to a few places:
  • Switzerland
  • Spain
  • Italy

Peak walk between two mountains at Glacier 3000

Castle Howard, York

• Saw Kaifi Khalil and Shae Gill live in concert
• Kicked off the new year in Goa
• Helped organize PyData London 2023
• Shot an ad for a TV show (can’t say much: NDA)
• Lost my watch at the security in Milan airport and managed to trace it and got it back on my wrist in about a month.
• Learnt how to refill printer cartidges and save plenty of $$
• Designed & Printed a photobook for my wife
• Passed my Driving Test in the UK.