In case you missed it, Spyder 5 was released at the beginning of April! This blog post is a conversation attempting to document the long and complex process of improving Spyder's UI with this release. Portions lead by Juanita Gomez are marked as Juanita, and those lead by Isabela Presedo-Floyd are marked as Isabela.

What did we do?

[Juanita] Spyder was created more than 10 years ago and it has had the contributions of a great number of developers who have written code, proposed ideas, opened issues and tested PRs in order to build a piece of Spyder on their own. We (the Spyder team) have been lucky to have such a great community of people contributing throughout the years, but this is the first time that we decided to ask for help from an UX/UI expert! Why? You might wonder. Having the contributions of this great amount of people has resulted in inconsistencies around Spyder’s interface which we didn’t stop to analyze until now.

When Isabela joined Quansight, we realized that we had an opportunity of improving Spyder’s interface with her help. We thought her skill set was everything we needed to make Spyder’s UI better. So we started by reviewing the results of a community survey from a few months ago and realized that some of the most common feedback from users is related to its interface (very crowded, not consistent, many colors). This is why we decided to start a joint project with Isabela, (who we consider now part of the Spyder team) called Spyder 5!!!

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As a community manager in the Spyder team, I have been looking for ways of involving more users in the community and making Spyder useful for a larger number of people. With this, a new idea came: Education.

For the past months, we have been wondering with the team whether Spyder could also serve as a teaching-learning platform, especially in this era where remote instruction has become necessary. We submitted a proposal to the Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) program of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, during its third cycle, with the idea of providing a simple way inside Spyder to create and share interactive tutorials on topics relevant to scientific research. Unfortunately, we didn’t get this funding, but we didn’t let this great idea die.

We submitted a second proposal to the Python Software Foundation from which we were awarded $4000. For me, this is the perfect opportunity for us to take the first step towards using Spyder for education.

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For contributors to the PyTorch codebase, one of the most commonly encountered C++ classes is TensorIterator. TensorIterator offers a standardized way to iterate over elements of a tensor, automatically parallelizing operations, while abstracting device and data type details.

In April 2020, Sameer Deshmukh wrote a blog article discussing PyTorch TensorIterator Internals. Recently, however, the interface has changed significantly. This post describes how to use the current interface as of April 2021. Much of the information from the previous article is directly copied here, but with updated API calls and some extra details.

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JupyterLab Accessibility Journey Part 1

For the past few months, I've been part of a group of people in the JupyterLab community who've committed to start chipping away at the many accessibility failings of JupyterLab. I find this work is critical, fascinating, and a learning experience for everyone involved. So I'm going to document my personal experience and lessons I've learned in a series of blog posts. Welcome!

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Starting from Numba 0.53, Numba will ship with an enhanced version of the @guvectorize decorator. Similar to the @vectorize decorator, @guvectorize now has two modes of operation:

• Eager, or decoration-time compilation and
• Lazy, or call-time compilation

Before, only the eager approach was supported. In this mode, users are required to provide a list of concrete supported types beforehand as its first argument. Now, this list can be omitted if desired and as one calls it, Numba dynamically generates new kernels for previously unsupported types.

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At Quansight we have a weekly "Q-share" session on Fridays where everyone can share/demo things they have worked on, recently learned, or that simply seem interesting to share with their colleagues. This can be about anything, from new utilities to low-level performance, from building inclusive communities to how to write better documentation, from UX design to what legal & accounting does to support the business. This week I decided to try something different: hold a brainstorm on the state of Python packaging today.

The ~30 participants were mostly from the PyData world, but not exclusively - it included people with backgrounds and preferences ranging from C, C++ and Fortran to JavaScript, R and DevOps - and with experience as end-users, packagers, library authors, and educators. This blog post contains the raw output of the 30-minute brainstorm (only cleaned up for textual issues) and my annotations on it (in italics) which capture some of the discussion during the session and links and context that may be helpful. I think it sketches a decent picture of the main pain points of Python packaging for users and developers interacting with the Python data and numerical computing ecosystem.

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SciPy n-dimensional Image Processing

SciPy's ndimage module provides a powerful set of general, n-dimensional image processing operations, categorized into areas such as filtering, interpolation and morphology. Traditional image processing deals with 2D arrays of pixels, possibly with an additional array dimension of size 3 or 4 to represent color channel and transparency information. However, there are many scientific applications where we may want to work with more general arrays such as the 3D volumetric images produced by medical imaging methods like computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or biological imaging approaches such as light sheet microscopy. Aside from spatial axes, such data may have additional axes representing other quantities such as time, color, spectral frequency or different contrasts. Functions in ndimage have been implemented in a general n-dimensional manner so that they can be applied across 2D, 3D or more dimensions. A more detailed overview of the module is available in the SciPy ndimage tutorial. SciPy's image functions are also used by downstream libraries such as scikit-image to implement higher-level algorithms for things like image restoration, segmentation and registration.

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Today I'm incredibly excited to welcome Tania Allard to Quansight as Co-Director of Quansight Labs. Tania (GitHub, Twitter, personal site) is a well-known and prolific PyData community member. In the past few years she has been involved as a conference organizer (JupyterCon, SciPy, PyJamas, PyCon UK, PyCon LatAm, JuliaCon and more), as a community builder (PyLadies, NumFOCUS, RForwards), as a contributor to Matplotlib and Jupyter, and as a regular speaker and mentor. She also brings relevant experience in both industry and academia - she joins us from Microsoft where she was a senior developer advocate, and has a PhD in computational modelling.

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JupyterLab 3.0 is about to be released and provides many improvements to the extension system. Theming is a way to extend JupyterLab and benefits from those improvements.

While theming is often disregarded as a purely cosmetic endeavour, it can greatly improve software. Theming can be great help for accessibility, and the Jupyter team pays attention to making the default appearance accessibility-aware by using sufficient contrast. For users with a high visual acuity you may also choose to increase the information density.

Theming can also be a great way to improve communication by increasing or decreasing emphasis of the user interface, which can be of use for teaching or presenting. Theming may also help with security, for example, by having a clear distinction between staging and production.

Finally Theming can be a great way to express oneself, for example, by using a branded version of software that fits well into a context, or expressing one's artistic preferences or opinions.

In the following blog post, we will show you step-by-step how you can develop a custom theme for JupyterLab, distribute it, and take the example of the jupyterlab-theme-winter theme we release today to celebrate the end of 2020.

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I am happy to announce that NumPy and OpenBLAS have once again been awarded a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative through Cycle 3 of the Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) program. This new grant totaling $140,000 will fund part of our efforts to improve usability and sustainability in both projects and is excellent news for the scientific computing community, which will certainly benefit from this work downstream.

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