This is the first edition of what I intend to be a monthly round-up of the month. I’m doing this a bit for you — to keep tabs on what I’m up to — and also a bit for me to reflect on where my focus and effort are.FN

Doing the work

I started the month wrapping up basic GitHub Checks integration for Times Square, a dynamic Jupyter notebook publishing service for the Rubin Science Platform. Times Square is in semi-stealth mode (they’re both currently public open source), but I can’t wait to see how they get used by Rubin teams.

Next, I spent some time working on a new Cookiecutter template for “SQuaRE-style” Python packages that are published to PyPI. We’ve been informally copying the same patterns between our major libraries like Safir and Documenteer, but this template formalizes the basic structure for a SQuaRE package. It also provided us a chance to update our best practices. For instance, we’ve switched to pyproject.toml entirely for project metadata, as I wrote about on this blog. Second, I wanted to find a way to make our common GitHub Actions workflows more maintainable. It turns out that composite GitHub Actions are a low-overhead way of grouping sequences of actions together. The result is that the “user” workflows are both shorter and have less code to maintain since all the logic is now maintained in centralized actions. So far I’ve made three composite actions: lsst-sqre/run-tox, lsst-sqre/ltd-upload, and lsst-sqre/build-and-publish-to-pypi.

I refreshed some of the Kafka infrastructure that SQuaRE uses internally and provides to the rest of Rubin Observatory. First, I updated the packaging for Kafkit, our Python package for encoding Kafka messages in conjunction with the Confluent Schema Registry. Kafkit is also available on conda-forge now at conda-forge/kafkit-feedstock. I also overhauled Strimzi Registry Operator, our Kubernetes operator for deploying the Confluence Schema Registry on a Strimzi-deployed Kafka cluster. One bit of that refresh I’m really happy with is a PR that deploys Kafka, the operator, and a Schema Registry in minikube within GitHub Actions. This technique for building an application within minikube has a lot of potential as way of running integration tests for a lot of our microservices.

Lastly, I’ve also been thinking more about my online presence, including the viability of Instagram and my years-long absence from Twitter. I’ve started to invest effort into Micro.blog as a way of owning my content and cross-posting to Twitter and Instagram where it makes sense. Social media was really important for launching my career, but while working Rubin I’ve let it all drop off. It feel like it’s time to re-emerge, but on my own terms. I feel like we’re doing a lot of cool stuff at Rubin, and it’s time to share it with the world now that we’re getting closer to first light.

Pursuits

I got a DJI Mini 3 micro drone. The technology is astounding. I’ve been steadily learning its flying functionality and just barely digging into its camera functionality. I’m also playing around with editing the drone footage on my iPad with LumaFusion. It really feels like the future.

Reading

Finished The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd and Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik (with Amanda). Started reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami.

Heavy rotation

The Garden by Basia Bulat (we’ve been playing this on vinyl at dinner), Formentera by Metric, and graves by Purity Ring.