I am a technologist who loves to build tools and communities, often for scientists and engineers who do not consider their main job to be software engineering. This is the blog where I document my own discovery and intrigue, and occasionally announce things that I have created.
Professionally, I lead the Python 🐍 community for accelerator controls at CERN ⚛️. In the past, I was a tech lead for Python in the data analysis and visualisation community at the Met Office ⛅.
I've worked in the scientific Python community for many years, and even though I may now have moved on from the projects, I am proud of my past contributions:
Since my last post more than seven years ago I have changed job, moved to a different country, and started a family. My interests have evolved, and my work capacity is also different: less time (kids), but making more of what there is (more experienced, and AI coding assistants helping …
I recently worked on a feature to allow cf-units to produce a TeX representation of a unit so that it can be quickly copy-and-pasted into a LaTeX document, or simply visualised nicely with matplotlib's LaTeX writer. It turns out that "doing it right" was quite involved, and has ultimately led …
UGRID and LFRic: Polygon mesh intersections¶I'm aiming to investigate whether it is possible to use the existing python tools to compute intersections of cells definied on the Met Office's LFRic cubesphere. A (possibly out of date but still enlightening) presentation about the LFRic datamodel can also be found here …
I'm fortunate to live near to one of the best continuous coastal walking/hiking routes in the world. The UK's South West Coast Path is a scenic, cultural and culinary delight spanning 630 miles from Minehead to Poole. It is steeped with history, and apparently was originally created by the …
Contributor license agreements are a thing. As much as I dislike the bureaucracy of them, they do provide some additional cover to the owners of an open source project, and some companies insist on having them. I find myself in such a situation in the SciTools organisation, for which I …
In part three of my XKCD font saga I generated several hundred glyphs as PPM images, and classified them with their associated character(s). In this instalment, I will convert the raster glyphs into vector form (SVG) and then generate a rudimentary font using FontForge. If you'd like to follow …
In part two of my XKCD font saga I was able to separate strokes from the XKCD handwriting dataset into many smaller images. I also handled the easier cases of merging some of the strokes back together - I particularly focused on "dotty" or "liney" type glyphs, such as i, !, % and …
In part one of XKCD font saga I gave some background on the XKCD handwriting dataset, and took an initial look at image segmentation in order to extract the individual strokes from the scanned image. In this instalment, I will apply the technique from part 1, as well as attempting …
The XKCD font (as used by matplotlib et al.) recently got an update to include lower-case characters. For some time now I have been aware of a handwriting sample produced by Randall Munroe (XKCD's creator) that I was interested in exploring. The ultimate aim is to automatically produce a font-file …
This evening I'm going to take a different approach to how I would normally blog. Rather than reporting the results of a technical investigation or highlighting a new/shiny package, I wanted to paint a realistic picture of the technical exploration process. As it happens, this particular investigation consumed a …
Introducing conda-build-all, a tool which extends conda-build to provide powerful build matrix capabilities. Repositories such as conda-forge/stages-recipes, SciTools/conda-recipes-scitools and ioos/conda-recipes exist to provide a set of conda recipes, and ultimately, channels from which users can access the product of conda-build-ing those recipes. The build phase of …
Conda is awesome - it is a simple package manager which allows me to create isolated software environments much like virtualenv. Unlike virtualenv though it can handle any package type, not just python ones. The more I use it, the more I want to make use of conda's dependency tracking for …
After what feels like years chipping away at the problem, not least from some awesome developers including the whole of the IPython development team, Michael Droetboom and Jason Grout, I recently closed the development loop and added a new matplotlib backend providing interactive figures in the IPython notebook environment. The …
I often deal with huge gridded datasets which either stretch or indeed are beyond the limits of my computer's memory. In the past I've implemented a couple of workarounds to help me handle this data to extract meaningful analyses from them. One of the most intuitive ways of reducing gridded …
When dealing with colours in scientific visualisations some people like to have a colourmap which can be indexed into to pick specific colours. Whilst this isn't necessarily the best way of handling colours in matplotlib, it certainly adds a degree of familiarity to users who have come over from other …
I recently added a new function to matplotlib to make it easier to draw pseudo-colour plots given specific levels and colours, in exactly the same way as you can with contour and contourf. import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt from matplotlib.colors import from_levels_and_colors cmap, norm = from_levels_and_colors …
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