This month in Julia world - 2023-05

Community Newsletter
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There was a call to action for someone to make a newsletter that lists interesting developments in the Julia world, in order to communicate improvements to the language that are not visible unless you track Github and Slack closely. This is my humble attempt, an editorialized, biased, incomplete list of what I personally found interesting this month.

Discourse:

Slack:

Github:

Dustbin of history:

Please feel free to add your own interesting finds, or in-depth explanations, or questions about these developments below.

If you want to help with the 2023 June issue of this informal, biased, editorialized, incomplete newsletter, just dump your SHORT notes in the June draft. Some of it might survive and be posted in my June post (or maybe I will forget about this by then, but someone else will take care of future posts).

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This was very cool; thanks for putting it together!

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Maybe the best post (topic) I’ve seen on Discourse. I missed a lot of this stuff. I also fully support you being a ruthless autocrat when exercising your editorial voice.

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I like this initiative as a typical example of what happens in the Julia ecosystem at large. Lots to do and too few people to do it, so at some point a volunteer rolls up their sleeves and contributes. Thank you!

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Great initiative! I hope that Julia’s community can grow to the level that this newsletter can compete in quality and content with Rust’s newsletter.
https://this-week-in-rust.org/blog/2023/05/24/this-week-in-rust-496/

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This is awesome, please keep on doing it! Wonderful selection of hard-to-find nuggets of information, and excellent tradeoff of conciseness vs completeness! One thing that confused me is that you put each link twice, so it’s less readable than if you just have one link per item.

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Thanks for doing this awesome post.

Extremely excited about libuv update which will support io_uring in linux. Each post honestly is very exciting stuff.

It is a good time to be a Julia enthusiast and practitioner.

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This one is soooooOOOOOO great!

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Great stuff! Thanks for doing this.

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I created a subcategory here: Community/Newsletter to make it easy for folks to subscribe to just this category see the small bell.

I really enjoy LLVM Weekly and MLIR News and if we can sustain something like this for Julia that would be awesome!

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@Krastanov, this is really really great. Thank you! Do you feel that doing this monthly is sustainable for you? Is there anyway we can help without flooding you with a million redundant suggestions?

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I have no idea whether it is sustainable, but probably will know in a few months.

The easiest way to help would be to add neatly formatted short suggestions with links in the draft for next mont

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An (naive) idea here: why not put it in a repo? (in e.g. markdown) That way, it may be as easy to contribute, to track change, to be accessible by the community (instead of needing to know / find the link to the google doc) and also, for someone else to “publish” it if it appears it’s too much of a burden for you (which would be understandable, of course).

NB: I’m talking of the draft, of course

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Sure, but I do not see what anyone gets out of this. I am lazy and do not want to create unnecessary work for myself. But I would be happy to let you set that up and take over if you would like!

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Two avenues. Firstly you can make post on discourse so called “community wikis”, secondly hackmd.io is a great platform for collaborative markdown editing so you don’t need to reformat the GDoc.

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This is a fantastic initiative! Please do keep it going :slight_smile:

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Thank you, Stefan! This is great work!!

I was wondering if you would be open to including blog posts about Julia eg. from the Dev.to community and maybe Medium posts as well…?

Some other sections you might want to consider adding to the newsletter are:

  • Calls for participation
  • new package releases (or new versions of existing packages)
  • info about Julia conference(s) (ie. JuliaCon as well as package-focused conferences about Pluto, JuMp, SciML etc.)
  • Julia job postings

You might want to get in touch with @logankilpatrick about the community spaces & initiatives that he’s set up for the Julia Community already, too.

Just a thought…

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All of these suggestions make a ton of sense. Just go ahead and add anything along these lines to the draft, even if there is no obvious section for it right now.

If I think something is inappropriate I will simply delete it and we can have a more detailed back-and-forth about sections if that happens. But no need to spend too much time thinking about it until such an occasion arises.

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Hey! I want to volunteer for this work!

I was thinking, what if we create a GitHub organization WeeklyJulia so that we can receive pings and issues with links there. That way, we don’t put a big burden to the devs, a ping in GitHub is almost free. Issue filling is a little more annoying, but still less than a new full blog. With those, then we can do the editorial work every weekend.

If you think this is a good idea, I can create the Org. :slight_smile:

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I personally think that this just overly complicates things and creates way too many roadblocks for contributors (compared to the current version of just dumping your thoughts in a google doc and simply copy pasting it on discourse). But I do not have ownership over this and you are at least the second person suggesting the github approach, so if you have the bandwidth to make all this work, please do! No need to ask for permission :smiley:

Edit: Feel free to also ping whoever here has expressed desire to help, and we can have a longer discussion on whatever platform you set up.

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