Routine maintenance

[ericmjl]

@rlouf I added just a few small things.

Primarily a gitignore, and then planning some things like a pre-commit configuration, and an environment spec file. I'll PR them bit by bit, to make the review easy.

As you might be able to tell, I'm kinda quite interested in mcx. Brought it up to the rest of the PyMC4 dev team on the last call I was on, as I wanted to do some API experiments. JAX seems to be the "right" next thing for building numerical Python packages.

[rlouf]

@ericmjl Thank you, these would be very useful additions. I’ll review later this week.

I’m really humbled by your interest in the project. Would you like to have a quick chat in the coming week so you can share your ideas? I can give you an honest tour of the library (good, bad & ugly), what I’m currently doing and the current plans. Would love to have feedback from someone who has experience working on a PPL that is actually used. We can move this discussion to Twitter DMs if you’d like.

[talesa]

We can move this discussion to Twitter DMs if you’d like.

Hey guys! If you don't mind keeping the discussion public then please do continue leaving a trace somewhere on github, I'm having a look every now and then :)

[ericmjl]

Hey @rlouf!

I’m really humbled by your interest in the project.

Please don't elevate me like that! :joy: I am just another PPL user who likes nice APIs :). I'm also not very well-versed in the internals of some of the advanced parts of a PPL, so seeing an API design from scratch is quite educational for me as well.

Would you like to have a quick chat in the coming week so you can share your ideas? I can give you an honest tour of the library (good, bad & ugly), what I’m currently doing and the current plans. Would love to have feedback from someone who has experience working on a PPL that is actually used. We can move this discussion to Twitter DMs if you’d like.

Yeah, let's do it! I think we should set up a call, and take notes on the issue tracker. Centralizing comms so that others like @talesa can keep tabs is a great way to get feedback from others and possibly build a community of practice around an idea. What do you think?

[rlouf]

Yeah, let's do it! I think we should set up a call,

Would love to, you can contact me on Twitter to set up a call (I can't DM you).

and take notes on the issue tracker. Centralizing comms so that others like @talesa can keep tabs is a great way to get feedback from others and possibly build a community of practice around an idea. What do you think?

Great idea! It's also great for us; I've had several discussions already and I don't remember exactly who said what :/ We can use a label to make these notes searchable.

[rlouf]

The gitignore looks great now, thank you! One hill I am ready to die on though is that code coverage sucks. Avi Bryant recently tweeted an article that summarizes my view about tests very well. I’ll probably need to add that to developer resources one day.

So we can just delete these two lines, and then move on to pre-commit which I am really excited about! Hooks are so great yet hard to share. Can’t wait to see how it works.

[rlouf]

gitignore looks good to me!

[rlouf]

Thank you for the addition @ericmjl ! I rebased the branch on master, merging and closing as we discussed.