I'm a member of the core team of conda-forge, a "garden" of curated packages in the jungle that is the wider software ecosystem. 🌴

I'm also a SciPy maintainer, which has non-trivial overlap with my packaging work. When both worlds come together, you get stories like this one.

The explosive growth in the above-mentioned "jungle" is an awe-inspiring thing to behold, but not rarely things clash or crash, don't work, or are simply a massive pain to install and set up.

I like that in conda-forge, you can get a high-quality set of packages from an extremely broad set of fields that generally play well together, and are a breeze to install. It's also nice to collaborate on this common good, where we plant seeds and flowers consciously, take care of the weeds, or clean things up when a tree falls over.

It's just a much more efficient thing to collaborate on something like this, rather than everyone going at it themselves and running into the same problems a thousand times over. The bundled expertise of many contributors allows us to fix problems comprehensively, in a way that benefits everyone. Billions of package downloads indicate that this is useful to people. 🙃

Obviously conda-forge would not be possible without a huge and diverse set of contributors, and I wouldn't dream of taking credit for something so vast. On the other hand, I do spend a substantial amount of time taking care of our infrastructure (compilers, images, C/C++ standard libraries), as well as several big gnarly packages. Here's a list of things I've invested a lot of time in over the years. If some of them are part of your environment and you're happy with the result, feel free to shout me a coffee. 😉

• our LLVM stack (clang, flang, openmp, etc.)
• our BLAS stack (across all flavours)
• NumPy & SciPy
• arrow & r-arrow
• abseil, grpc, protobuf
• cython & pythran
• pytorch & its ecosystem
• tensorflow
• openssl
• faiss
• boost
• torch{audio,text,vision}
• pygame
• gymnasium
• ray
• sentencepiece
• openjdk
• google-cloud-cpp
• kaldi
• mongodb
• bazel
• the cvxpy ecosystem
• the SpaCy ecosystem
• the SDL ecosystem
• the allennlp ecosystem