Jacob Tomlinson
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jacobtomlinson.dev
Jacob Tomlinson
@jacobtomlinson.dev
360 followers 300 following 260 posts
Building RAPIDS and Dask at NVIDIA. Views are my own. he/him.

https://jacobtomlinson.dev
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jacobtomlinson.dev
Five years ago I won third place in the NVIDIA employee pumpkin carving competition. Not sure I can top it to be honest! 🎃
A pumpkin with a carving of a haunted house.
October 29, 2025 at 10:32 PM
jacobtomlinson.dev
They have a fun π themed logo!
The Python 3.14 logo showing two snakes eating pie with the π logo around the edge
October 9, 2025 at 3:10 PM
jacobtomlinson.dev
The length of my todo list is stressing me out, so let’s set 20 mins on the clock and see how may things I can check off.
Photo of a timer showing 20 mins remaining
September 24, 2025 at 2:59 PM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Love the Computer Science History Museum, I went last year when I was at NVIDIA GTC! My favourite items were the teapot, and the prototype pong machine. It's so fun to see items that you've heard stories about that shaped some party of nerdy history.
The Utah Teapot. The original physical item that inspired the popular graphics model. The original prototype of the pong cabinet that was placed in Andy Capp's bar. The Atari team was called to tell them the machine had broken, and when they investigated it was just jammed so full of quarters it wouldn't work. This is how they knew they were on to a hit!
September 10, 2025 at 8:00 AM
jacobtomlinson.dev
The rise of coding agents means OSS projects need to ensure agents can parse their docs easily.

The llms.txt standard defines a way to publish docs in markdown for loading into context windows.

I made a quick Sphinx extension that makes it easy for you to do this!

github.com/jacobtomlins...
Code snippet showing you can add `sphinx_llm.txt` to your sphinx extensions to enable llms.txt support.
July 12, 2025 at 7:26 PM
jacobtomlinson.dev
semver.org
effver.org
calver.org
Three headed dragon meme that says "Major Version Releases". The two badass looking dragon heads say "SemVer - Breaking change" and "EffVer - Effort required". The goofy looking dragon head says "CalVer - Happy New Year"
June 30, 2025 at 3:10 PM
jacobtomlinson.dev
I'll be at @pydatalondon.bsky.social this weekend. On Friday we are running a GPU Accelerated Python tutorial where we will dig into CUDA development in Python with Numba, RAPIDS and more.

Hope to see lots of folks there!

cfp.pydata.org/london2025/t...
PyData London 2025 Tutorial GPU Accelerated Python, Friday 9am-12:30pm in the Grand Hall
June 3, 2025 at 12:54 PM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Microsoft's LightGBM (a popular open source gradient boosting ML library) just officially adopted EffVer as their version scheme!

lightgbm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/In...
Screenshot of the LightGBM readme with an effver badge
May 21, 2025 at 8:50 AM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Many Microsoft sites don't work properly in Firefox these days. Azure hasn't for a long time, but more recently Outlook web keeps logging me out and refusing to sign in again unless I clear all cookies/cache.

It's getting harder and harder to fight the pressure to switch to a Chrome based browser.
Screenshot of the "change your default browser" dialog with a choice between Chrome and Firefox.
May 19, 2025 at 1:38 PM
jacobtomlinson.dev
I think "funky junk code" is a great term for code you just blindly accept without really reading when vibe coding.

@joshwcomeau.com
www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/the-pos...
I also worry a bit about the next generation of developers. When using LLM agents, it’s so easy to get lulled into a trance, to keep hitting “accept changes” without understanding or even looking at the code being generated. I caught myself starting to fall into this trap when I was building the landing page for my new course(opens in new tab). I took my hand off the steering wheel for too long, and had to spend a bunch of time refactoring funky junk code as a result.
April 30, 2025 at 10:17 AM
jacobtomlinson.dev
qwen3:4b totally ignored the instructions to be concise, only respond with the title and keep things under 50 characters
Response from qwen3:4b: Okay, let's tackle this. The user wants a PR title for Kubernetes version updates based on a git diff. The title needs to be concise, in present tense, active voice, and under 50 characters. Looking at the diff, the main changes are in the workflows and the README. The Kubernetes versions mentioned are 1.32.3, 1.31.6, and 1.30.10. The README's shield image now includes 1.30.10. So the key point is adding 1.30.10 to the supported versions. The PR is likely updating the supported versions to include 1.30.10. The title should reflect that. Let me check the existing versions. The previous supported versions were 1.31, 1.32, 1.33. Now adding 1.30. So the title should mention adding 1.30.10. Possible titles: "Update Kubernetes version support to include 1.30.10" but that's 43 characters. Wait, the user said to focus on the Kubernetes version. Maybe "Add Kubernetes 1.30.10 to supported versions" which is 40 characters. That's good. Alternatively, "Update Kubernetes support to include 1.30.10" is 40 as well. Both are under 50. Active voice, present tense. The key is adding 1.30.10. The other versions are already there, so the main change is adding that one. So the title should highlight that addition. Add Kubernetes 1.30.10 to supported versions Response from llama3.2:3b: Upgrading Kubernetes version to 1.30.10 in test workflows.
April 29, 2025 at 2:37 PM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Yesterday I spent a bit of time running ollama in a GitHub Actions workflow to generate nice titles for automated PRs.

I love the idea of leveraging LLMs locally in a workflow without needing to call out to a third-party API.

jacobtomlinson.dev/posts/2025/g...
Screenshot of a GitHub Actions config that is prompting a llama3 model locally within the workflow. The prompt says: You are a helpful assistant that generates PR titles for Kubernetes version updates by summarising a git diff. The title should be concise and to the point, and should not include any markdown formatting. The title should be in the present tense. Your response must be no more than 50 characters. ```diff ${{ steps.diff.outputs.diff }} ``` Please summarize the changes in the diff with particular attention to the Kubernetes version that is being updated. Don't include the Python version information in the title or which files are being edited. Focus only on the Kubernetes version.
April 29, 2025 at 1:40 PM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Day 10 of using a different coreutils command every day for 100 days!✨

The mkdir command can make new directories, and the -p flag lets you created nested directories in one go.

jacobtomlinson.dev/blog/100-day...
$ mkdir -p foo/bar/baz $ ls -d foo/bar/baz foo/bar/baz
April 23, 2025 at 10:32 AM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Playing with Cursor again today. It tried to commit some code and the pre-commit hooks kept failing. It hasn't added the correct type annotations and mypy was complaining.

It tried to fix them a couple of times and when it couldn't it gave up and decided to skip pre-commit altogether 😅
Let's try committing our changes again, but this time with the --no-verify flag to skip the pre-commit hooks since we're having trouble with them:
April 17, 2025 at 2:44 PM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Day 9 of using a different coreutils command every day for 100 days!✨

The touch command can be used to create a new file or update the modified date of an existing file.

jacobtomlinson.dev/blog/100-day...
$ touch /tmp/foo $ ls -l /tmp/foo -rw-r--r-- 1 jtomlinson wheel 0 Apr 14 15:17 /tmp/foo $ touch -d 2026-03-14T00:00:00 /tmp/foo $ ls -l /tmp/foo -rw-r--r-- 1 jtomlinson wheel 0 Mar 14 2026 /tmp/foo
April 14, 2025 at 2:27 PM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Wow Marimo just overtook Jupyter Notebooks in terms of GitHub stars, and is quickly gaining on Jupyter Lab.
Graph showing marimo has overtaken jupyter notebooks and will overtake jupyterlab in the next few months.
April 14, 2025 at 11:29 AM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Day 8 of using a different coreutils command every day for 100 days!✨

The link or `ln` command is used commonly for creating symbolic links, and can also be used for creating hard links.

jacobtomlinson.dev/blog/100-day...
$ ln -s /bin/bash bosh $ ls -l total 0 lrwxr-xr-x 1 jtomlinson wheel 9 Mar 25 11:13 bosh -> /bin/bash
March 25, 2025 at 11:25 AM
jacobtomlinson.dev
The 2006 version feels more like "my Neopets". I was starting to learn HTML around this time too, and spent ages trying to figure out how they achieved this layout.

It was tables! This was before CSS layouts. You would put everything inside a table and manage your columns and rows that way.
Screenshot fo the Neopets home page in 2006
March 21, 2025 at 1:02 PM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Today I learned why my markdown titles sometimes don't render properly.

jacobtomlinson.dev/posts/2025/w...
Three markdown titles, two are rendered correctly, but the middle one isn't. They say; This title works, This title should also work but doesn’t, This title works though! Whyyyy!
March 14, 2025 at 11:23 AM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Day 7 of using a different coreutils command every day for 100 days.

The `true` command does nothing, but always returns `0`. Useful when you use `set -e` in a script but still allow a specific command to fail.

jacobtomlinson.dev/blog/100-day...
#!/bin/bash # somescript.sh set -e # If a command fails exit the script # The rm fails but the or true makes stops the script from exiting rm /tmp/filethatdoesntexist || true
March 13, 2025 at 5:33 PM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Day 6 of using a different coreutils command every day for 100 days.

The `rm` command removes a file. Combining the flags `-r` and `-f` can result in removing your productivity for an entire day.

jacobtomlinson.dev/blog/100-day...
# How to have a bad day sudo rm -rf /
March 12, 2025 at 2:00 PM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Day 5 of using a different coreutils command every day for 100 days!

The `dir` command is effectively an alias to `ls -C -b` which forces multiple columns and escapes special characters.

It exists mostly to be compatible with other OSs like DOS and Windows.

jacobtomlinson.dev/blog/100-day...
$ dir / bin boot dev etc home lib media mnt opt proc root run sbin srv sys tmp usr var
March 11, 2025 at 11:18 AM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Day 4 of using a different coreutils command every day for 100 days!✨

Moving a file with `mv` will rename a file if the move is on the same disk, or copy and then delete it if the destination is on another disk.

jacobtomlinson.dev/blog/100-day...
mv /tmp/foo /tmp/bar
March 10, 2025 at 10:35 AM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Day 3 of using a different coreutils command every day for 100 days!

One of the first commands you will ever use is `ls` to list the files in a directory.

Here are my most used `ls` aliases.

jacobtomlinson.dev/blog/100-day...
# Set ls colours export LSCOLORS=ExFxBxDxCxegedabagacad # Aliases to make ls easier to use in different modes alias ll="ls -lh" # Detailed list format and human readable file sizes alias la="ls -lah" # Show hidden files too alias sl="ls" # For inevitable typos
March 7, 2025 at 11:53 AM
jacobtomlinson.dev
Day 2 of using a different coreutils command every day for 100 days!✨

The copy command `cp` allows you to copy a file from one place to another. I commonly use the `-R` flag to copy a directory recursively and have used the `-L` flag to copy symlinked files too.

jacobtomlinson.dev/blog/100-day...
# Copy a file cp /tmp/foo /tmp/bar # Recursively copy a directory cp -R /tmp/dir1/ /tmp/dir2/ # Recursively copy a directory and expand symbolic links # The linked files will be copied instead of just the links cp -LR /tmp/dir1/ /tmp/dir2/
March 6, 2025 at 10:20 AM