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Showing posts from April, 2022

Including API documentation in docs built with Jupyter Book

The title is chock full of jargon. Let me break it down. API stands for Application Programming Interface. An API is the user-facing part of a software package. For example, if you use the "numpy" package, "numpy.array" is an API. And APIs need to be documented. A single API can produce different results depending on the inputs so documenting the full capabilities of an API is important. Jupyter Book  is a new tool in the Scientific Python community to create and upload documentation easily. The community as a whole seems to be working towards better documenting their projects and some have chosen to go with Jupyter Book instead of relying on Sphinx. I personally don't know why the community felt the need to move away from vanilla rst ( reStructureText ) and Sphinx . One of the advantages of Sphinx is the fact that API documentation for the package can be created automatically (using sphinx-apidoc ) and the API docs can be included in the user-facing documentati...

Books I read in March 2022

I got lucky in March 2022. I happened to be in Bhopal for two weeks. Specifically, I was at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal with my wife. She was wrapping up some work at the TrEE lab in the Biology department. She successfully defended her PhD thesis in 2021 but she needed to go back to wrap up some loose ends. I went along with her and I got to meet her labmates. That's how I came across Improbable destinies by Jonathan Losos . As far as I can remember, it's the first biology/ecology book that I have read. It's technically a popular science book but it's not something that a school student can read and understand. But, it's damn good. I would definitely recommend it to biology and science undergraduates who are yet to understand and decide where their interests lie in. Preeti likes the fact that I can atleast know of and can use some of the vocabulary she works with on a day-to-day basis. The book introduces the reader to con...