Brandon Sanderson has been releasing a few chapters a week of his upcoming novel, Wind and Truth, on his publisher’s website leading up to its December 6 ^th release. This includes the audiobook chapters, but they’re posted to Soundcloud and there’s no good way to listen at 1.6x speed. This post is a note sheet on how to download audio from Soundcloud and prepare it for my audiobook reader.

PEP 735 introduced dependency groups in packaging metadata, which are complementary to optional dependencies in that they might not correspond to features in the package, but rather be something like development or release dependencies. I am slowly working towards updating my cookiecutter template cookiecutter-snekpack to use PEP 735. So far, uv and tox have released support - all that’s left is ReadTheDocs.

Graphviz is software for graph visualization written in C. PyGraphviz provides a nice Python wrapper for it. The issue is that getting Python to know about the C headers changes every few months. I’ll try and keep this blog post updated every time there are some changes.

I’m working through making a contribution to pandoc that adds first-class support for author role annotations using the Contribution Role Taxonomy (CRediT) and also outputs compliant Journal Publishing Tag Set (JATS) XML. This has lead me down a (losing) journey with learning the Haskell programming language, so I thought I would post a short note on a function I tried to understand.

The International Society of Biocuration (ISB) partners with the journal Database to get discounts for its members when they publish there. This means the ISB’s executive committee needs to send a member list to the journal’s editor.

The Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID) database is an invaluable resource that supports the unambiguous identification of researchers. However, its first party data dump is too complex, verbose, and unstandardized for many use cases. This post describes open source software I wrote that automates downloading, processing, and exporting ORCID into a more usable form. I put the results on Zenodo under the CC0 license.

I’ve just returned from the 17 ^th Annual International Biocuration Conference at the Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC) in Faridabad, India.

Using Pydantic for encoding data models and FastAPI for implementing APIs on top of them has become a staple for many Python programmers.

I finally got back into reading! Over winter break 2022, I started the Stormlight Archive then followed up in 2023 by reading the entirety of Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere , as well as a some other fantasy, science fiction, and literary fiction. Here’s the list.

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a widely used biomedical and clinical vocabulary maintained by the United States National Library of Medicine. However, it is notoriously difficult to access and work with due to licensing restrictions and its complex download system. In the same vein as my previous posts about DrugBank and ChEMBL, this post describes open source software I’ve developed for downloading and working with this data.