Patrick Bos

15 posts

Research Software Engineer working on high-performance computing, C++, and build systems.

Git8 RSE6 Python5 Physics3 API3 C++3 Performance3 Environment2

Sep 25, 2025

Be like Jurriaan

Write copy-pasteable READMEs for developers The main message of this post is short: Thank you, Jurriaan H. Spaaks , for including developer’s READMEs in the zenodraft and the zenodraft GitHub action r...

Apr 6, 2023

Ditching Docker Hub: serve research software with GHCR + Zenodo

Or pay the price… that Docker Hub may charge you Scrooge McDuck who throws a Docker container in the trash in the style of Disney… according to Stable Diffusion. As a researcher, and especially as a r...

Jul 19, 2022

What do entropy, entanglement, cosmology, life, and fake news have in common?

Report on the Information Universe 4 conference (Answer to the above question below obligatory excruciatingly long-winded intro!) In the past week, I have rediscovered writing. Writing really hurts, y...

Nov 16, 2021

Combining ZeroMQ & POSIX signals

Use ppoll to handle EINTR once and for all Eventually, I found this article on EINTR in ZeroMQ by Martin Sustrik (ZeroMQ creator) himself. More precisely, in the comment section Ambroz Bizjak suggeste...

Mar 5, 2021

Automate chores with GitHub Actions

How I keep my Heroku web-app’s data up-to-date automatically Scientists, open source developers, and basically probably most people, have to deal with one common obstacle in life: lack of funds to do...

Feb 19, 2021

Twitter Bots, for Science!

How to build a bot to show Covid-19 vaccination progress Twitter bots have a really bad rep. Troll armies, spam, fake news… You name it, a bot’s done it. But what if we could harness their powers for...

Nov 10, 2020

Coalition polls for the people with Coalitiewijzer

Build interactive web apps with polling data, Voilà & Heroku My first attempt at actual visualization was to make another grid, but this time consisting of 150 HTML widgets, one for each seat. The...

Mar 18, 2020

Remote revolution at the eScience Center

Tools and practices for collaborating from home One of the core values of the Netherlands eScience Center is collaboration. We work with teams and even whole communities of scientists. Communication i...

Feb 12, 2020

Combining ZeroMQ & POSIX signals

Use ppoll to handle EINTR once and for all What my first experience trying to send out signals was like. Can anybody hear me? Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash I have been dabbling in using and mixi...

May 23, 2019

democracy

Dimensional reduction. Who doesn’t love it? Everybody does! On that note: EU election week! Time to map our complex individual preferences to one of a few packages of lumped together stances. Luckily,...

Jan 23, 2019

c++ compile-time exceptions

Debugging C++ templates should be less surreal and horrible C++ programmers in their natural habitat, building awesome things and staring at walls of error text. A C++ template error can be pages long...

Sep 3, 2018

50 times faster data loading for pandas no problem

Loading irregular data into Pandas using C++ Irregular pandas If Python is the reigning king of data science, Pandas is the kingdom’s bureaucracy. As recognized by Pandas creator Wes McKinney himself,...

Aug 6, 2018

floating (point) butterfly effect

Searching for tiny bugs that cause big problems I know it’s a bug, but it’s so pretty… what harm could it do? Last year, I took a few weeks to look into floating point round-off errors in RooFit, the...

Jun 5, 2018

blobs, bumps, clouds and clusters

Statistical fluke or scientific evidence? Definitely a blob. Another earth-shattering discovery is on the horizon. Evidence was found for a new fundamental particle! The times we live in! Coming from...

Feb 6, 2017

Travis caching and incremental builds

Update (Aug 7, 2018): added a section at the bottom with new configuration settings and an added time-out step for extending build times beyond the 50 minute limit to bootstrap your build cache. Orig...

← All posts

Patrick Bos

Be like Jurriaan

Ditching Docker Hub: serve research software with GHCR + Zenodo

What do entropy, entanglement, cosmology, life, and fake news have in common?

Combining ZeroMQ &amp; POSIX signals

Automate chores with GitHub Actions

Twitter Bots, for Science!

Coalition polls for the people with Coalitiewijzer

Remote revolution at the eScience Center

Combining ZeroMQ & POSIX signals

democracy

c++ compile-time exceptions

50 times faster data loading for pandas no problem

floating (point) butterfly effect

blobs, bumps, clouds and clusters

Travis caching and incremental builds

Combining ZeroMQ & POSIX signals