Here’s another Year in Books (I missed last year, but here’s 2022). Most of these came from recommendations by friends, The Incomparable’s Book Club and (a new source), the “Books in the Box” episodes of Oxide and Friends. The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder I technically read it in the last few days of 2023, but included here because I liked it so much. This came recommended by the Oxide and Friends podcast’s Books in the Box episode. I didn’t know a ton about the history of computing, but have been picking up an appreciation for it thanks to reading this book. It goes into a ton of detail about what it took Data General to design and release a new machine. Highly recommended to anyone interested in computing. ...

This post is a bit of a tutorial on serializing and deserializing Python dataclasses. I’ve been hacking on zarr-python-v3 a bit, which uses some dataclasses to represent some metadata objects. Those objects need to be serialized to and deserialized from JSON. This is a (surprisingly?) challenging area, and there are several excellent libraries out there that you should probably use. My personal favorite is msgspec, but cattrs, pydantic, and pyserde are also options. But hopefully this can be helpful for understanding how those libraries work at a conceptual level (their exact implementations will look very different.) In zarr-python’s case, this didn’t quite warrant needing to bring in a dependency, so we rolled our own. ...

I wrote up a quick introduction to stac-geoparquet on the Cloud Native Geo blog with Kyle Barron and Chris Holmes. The key takeaway: STAC GeoParquet offers a very convenient and high-performance way to distribute large STAC collections, provided the items in that collection are pretty homogenous Check out the project at http://github.com/stac-utils/stac-geoparquet.

I have, as they say, some personal news to share. On Monday I (along with some very talented teammates, see below if you’re hiring) was laid off from Microsoft as part of a reorganization. Like my Moving to Microsoft post, I wanted to jot down some of the things I got to work on. For those of you wondering, the Planetary Computer project does continue, just without me. Reflections It should go without saying that all of this was a team effort. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have great teammates over the years, but the team building out the Planetary Computer was especially fantastic. Just like before, this will be very self-centered and project-focused, overlooking all the other people and work that went into this. ...

Ned Batchelder recently shared Real-world match/case, showing a real example of Python’s Structural Pattern Matching. These real-world examples are a great complement to the tutorial, so I’ll share mine. While working on some STAC + Kerchunk stuff, in this pull request I used the match statement to parse some nested objects: for k, v in refs.items(): match k.split("/"): case [".zgroup"]: # k = ".zgroup" item.properties["kerchunk:zgroup"] = json.loads(v) case [".zattrs"]: # k = ".zattrs" item.properties["kerchunk:zattrs"] = json.loads(v) case [variable, ".zarray"]: # k = "prcp/.zarray" if u := item.properties["cube:dimensions"].get(variable): u["kerchunk:zarray"] = json.loads(refs[k]) elif u := item.properties["cube:variables"].get(variable): u["kerchunk:zarray"] = json.loads(refs[k]) case [variable, ".zattrs"]: # k = "prcp/.zattrs" if u := item.properties["cube:dimensions"].get(variable): u["kerchunk:zattrs"] = json.loads(refs[k]) elif u := item.properties["cube:variables"].get(variable): u["kerchunk:zattrs"] = json.loads(refs[k]) case [variable, index]: # k = "prcp/0.0.0" if u := item.properties["cube:dimensions"].get(variable): u.setdefault("kerchunk:value", collections.defaultdict(dict)) u["kerchunk:value"][index] = refs[k] elif u := item.properties["cube:variables"].get(variable): u.setdefault("kerchunk:value", collections.defaultdict(dict)) u["kerchunk:value"][index] = refs[k] The for loop is iterating over a set of Kerchunk references, which are essentially the keys for a Zarr group. The keys vary a bit. They could be: ...

I wanted to share an update on a couple of developments in the STAC ecosystem that I’m excited about. It’s a great sign that even after 2 years after its initial release, the STAC ecosystem is still growing and improving how we can catalog, serve, and access geospatial data. STAC and Geoparquet A STAC API is a great way to query for data. But, like any API serving JSON, its throughput is limited. So in May 2022, the Planetary Computer team decided to export snapshots of our STAC database as geoparquet. Each STAC collection is exported as a Parquet dataset, where each record in the dataset is a STAC item. We pitched this as a way to do bulk queries over the data, where returning many and many pages of JSON would be slow (and expensive for our servers and database). ...

Last week, I was fortunate to attend Dave Beazley’s Rafting Trip course. The pretext of the course is to implement the Raft Consensus Algorithm. I’ll post more about Raft, and the journey of implementing, it later. But in brief, Raft is an algorithm that lets a cluster of machines work together to reliably do something. If you had a service that needed to stay up (and stay consistent), even if some of the machines in the cluster went down, then you might want to use Raft. ...

A few colleagues and I recently presented at the CIROH Training and Developers Conference. In preparation for that I created a Jupyter Book. You can view it at https://tomaugspurger.net/noaa-nwm/intro.html I created a few cloud-optimized versions for subsets of the data, but those will be going away since we don’t have operational pipelines to keep them up to date. But hopefully the static notebooks are still helpful. Lessons learned Aside from running out of time (I always prepare too much material for the amount of time), I think things went well. JupyterHub (perhaps + Dask) and Kubernetes continues to be a great way to run a workshop. ...

Over in Planetary Computer land, we’re working on bringing Sentinel-5P into our STAC catalog. STAC items require a geometry property, a GeoJSON object that describes the footprint of the assets. Thanks to the satellites’ orbit and the (spatial) size of the assets, we started with some…interesting… footprints: That initial footprint, shown in orange, would render the STAC collection essentially useless for spatial searches. The assets don’t actually cover (most of) the southern hemisphere. ...