August is an odd month. It’s both the height of summer while also feeling like the end of summer up here.
Doing the work
This month, I got back into the user interface for Times Square on the Rubin Science Platform (Squareone). Now when you pull request changes to a notebook repository, Times Square will not only verify that notebooks execute cleanly, but it will also give you a link to view the rendered notebooks (lsst-sqre/squareone#84. I think this feature will make publishing notebooks to the Times Square platform easier for Rubin staff, and will promote a pull request-based workflow.
On YouTube, I stumbled upon a video by Chantastic (of React podcast fame) about setting up Storybook with Next.js. Storybook is an app for developing and documenting components (such as React components) in isolated contexts. I’ve known of Storybook for a while in the context of learning about design systems (hat tip to Atomic Design by Brad Frost), but I’d always considered it to be something for big teams that had the resources to set up design documentation infrastructures for their web projects. Well, it turns out that not only is Storybook amazingly easy to drop into an existing React application, but it also solves some glaring problems in my web development workflow. React components can have behaviours that depend on state. Working with state while developing components can be, quite frankly, a pain. With Storybook, I can now inject state into “stories” about my components, and even adjust that state in real time to see how the component adapts. You can see this initial Storybook related work in lsst-sqre/squareone#87 and lsst-sqre/squareone#93.
Towards the end of the month, I moved on to another Rubin web project: theming Rubin’s Sphinx documentation sites. We’re trying out pydata-sphinx-theme, which features a three column design (navigation — content — content headers) and a novel top navigation bar. Because that top navigation bar is populated from the root-level toctree elements of a Sphinx site, adopting pydata-sphinx-theme can take some content re-organization. I’ve implemented the theme in Documenteer, and I really like the result. My pull request to set up a Rubin configuration for Sphinx documentation is lsst-sqre/documenteer#129
Pursuits
Down in the wood shop (I can’t decide whether I want to call it a wood shop or workshop or even a studio) I made solid progress on my tool chest, based on the boarded chest in the Anarchist’s Design Book by Schwarz. I used my combination plane to make rabbets and nailed the chest walls together with fantastically-strong 2" cut nails. Then I used the combination plane to make tongue-and-groove joints for the bottom boards and nailed each board on, again with the 2" cut nails. I slightly mis-aligned one board while nailing it, and after failing to pull out the nails, realized that these cut nails have fantastic holding strength. I’m not worried about the chest bottom falling out. Now I’ve pivoted to making a set of low Krenovian saw horses to temporarily hold the chest at a workable height before I make a permanent stand (which could be months, years, or decades down the road).
Amanda and I got out for a bit more kayaking, and I shot and edited together a short video of us paddling around. It’s kind of dorky, but it’s also astonishing to think that we now have consumer-grade flying cameras that can follow people around perfectly.
Reading
Finished reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, The Book of M by Peng Shepard, and Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall. Resumed the Gabriel Allon series with Amanda: we’re on The Rembrandt Affair by Daniel Silva.
Heavy rotation
The tracking on my U-Turn Orbit turntable went for a (literal) loop this month. Something about the anti-skip being a bit too strong, I think? But I really enjoyed listening to records of She & Him’s Melt Away: A Tribute to Brian Wilson and Lizzo’s Special. I must have had Sylvan Esso’s No Rules Sandy on repeat through most work days. And after watching Dua Lipa’s episode on Song Exploder, I dug a bit into her Future Nostalgia album.
