Bas Nijholt

(See my intro post) There are not enough days in this advent calendar to highlight all my projects.

(See my intro post) Ever needed to calculate the square root of the determinant of a skew-symmetric matrix?

(See my intro post) Tracking personal finances is crucial, especially when working towards financial independence (see my WenFIRE post on Day 4).

(See my intro post) After creating pipefunc (Day 20), I wanted a way to visualize its (possibly large and complex) computational graphs interactively in Jupyter notebooks.

(See my intro post) Of all the projects I’m sharing this month, this one that started as a passion project excites me the most!

(See my intro post) Sometimes the best tools are the ones you build for yourself and keep using for years.

(See my intro post) 📝 Note: Running out of awesome projects and I want to save the best for last, so today just something fun.

(See my intro post) Ever tried to efficiently run 100,000 cores from a Jupyter notebook?

(See my intro post) During my PhD, I was running quantum transport simulations on our 800-core computational cluster.

(See my intro post) Sometimes the most useful tools are born from daily frustrations.

(See my intro post) When most people think of open source, they think of software.

(See my intro post) Ever tried to set up a Python project that needs both pip and conda packages?

(See my intro post) Ever found yourself with beautiful photos but too lazy to post them?

(See my intro post) Unlike other projects in this advent calendar, I want to celebrate being part of something much bigger: the conda-forge community, where thousands of volunteers maintain the packages that power scientific Python. 📖 Origin Story I start…

(See my intro post) Funny how things work out - initially, I didn’t care for home automation at all.

(See my intro post) Every academic writing in LaTeX knows the pain: managing BibTeX files with hundreds of citations, each potentially formatted slightly differently, with inconsistent journal abbreviations, and duplicated entries across chapters.

(See my intro post) What started as a personal hack to control my home (temperature, lights, TV, music) with a gifted Stream Deck evolved into something bigger.

(See my intro post) Sometimes the smallest tools solve the most persistent problems.

(See my intro post) Today’s post is about something I have strong opinions on: making scientific research reproducible.

(See my intro post) Documentation should be as close to the code as possible - that’s the principle of “information locality.”

(See my intro post) While I absolutely love my job, I believe I’ll love it even more when my family’s livelihood doesn’t depend on it.

(See my intro post) Sometimes the best open source projects start with “I can do better than this.”

(See my intro post) Unlike yesterday’s Calendar of Life project, today we’re looking at one of my most popular contributions.

(See my intro post.)

Recently, I discovered a game-changer in Git that has streamlined my workflow: worktrees.

The Challenge: Escaping the Cloud I recently wrote about my homelab and how I use TrueNAS on my NAS for data storage.

In 2020, I began my homelab journey (even though I never heard of the term “homelab” at that point) with a simple yet powerful setup: Home Assistant running on Proxmox on a NUC8i3BEH.

🌟 1.

Since end-2024, I have been using Nix-Darwin to set up my MacOS installations.

Visual Studio Code, or VSCode, has rapidly become one of the most popular code editors available today, and for good reason.

Originally written in April 2023 but slightly updated in March 2025.