SciTools core developer diary 2026

[trexfeathers]

News of the the SciTools core developers' work during 2026

• Finished work
• Current work
• Planned work

Work in progress 🚧

We are starting to align on ways to keep this diary updated; we shall see how it goes. Please be patient ❤️

[trexfeathers]

May

• user support surgery : 8 questions
• peloton devs meetings :
  • May 13
    • decided to deprecate the iris curl function
  • May 27
    • We started our first development sprint for iris 3.16 from 26th May (8 weeks scheduled)
• Ran a dask "dash" : investigation for team learning and advice improvement
  • 2 PRs merged on Dask project !
    • Fix LaTeX formula for split_every in docstrings by stephenworsley · Pull Request #12379 · dask/dask
    • Fix typo in array-chunks.rst by HGWright · Pull Request #12375 · dask/dask
  • Implemented a speed-up to PP Fields loading · Pull Request #7089
• assisted with ESMValTool User Workshop at UK MetOffice, May 11-13
• @rcomer @bjlittle @ESadek-MO met to discuss dev progress with tephi
• Team upskilling on Agentic Development 🤖⚡
• Big 💚 to @SgtVarmint for their first-contribution to iris · Pull Request #7087
• A productive Dragon Taming session! 🐉🐲
  These refinement sessions are essential for prioritising and planning upcoming large projects
  • JOSS Paper Submission  bjlittle/geovista#389
  • Allow global attributes on a Mesh iris#6085
  • Regridder Partitioning iris-esmf-regrid#427
  • Typing support iris#5924

[trexfeathers]

June

• User support surgery: 10 questions
• Preparation and delivery of Momentum User Training.
• Finishing a three week Iris sprint for Iris 3.16
• Peloton devs meetings:
  • 3rd June
    • Concrete decision to NOT action Should our handling of STASH objects be rationalised? iris#6286
    • Our repos are entering the Brave New World™️ of Agentic Pull Requests 🚀
      • WIP: Feature/depth dimension bjlittle/geovista#2294
      • 8 PRs from @gaoflow on Iris: link
  • 10th June
    • Discussed the merits of fork based PRs versus branch based PRs.
    • Closed two PRs:
      • Closed Improvements to GitHub Actions package caching iris#6803 in favour of exploring Pixi as an alternative: Adopt Pixi for reliable 'partitioning' of locked core and optional dependencies iris#6833
      • Requested Support for environment.yml/lockfiles SciTools-incubator/conda-rpms#26 to be closed as use of "conda rpms" is no longer relevant.

[trexfeathers]

@bjlittle and @trexfeathers just finished a pair-programming marathon hardening Iris' GitHub Actions using Zizmor. Among dozens of useful security tips, the highlight was probably "Dude, just use the gh CLI for this. No way do you need that marketplace action!" ❤️.

• Adopt zizmor iris#6809
• Adopt zizmor for secure GHAs iris#7138
• Some spill-over into other SciTools repos:
  • adopt zizmor workflows#191
  • zizmor: follow-up fixes workflows#193
  • Update GHA for workflows 2026.06.0 iris-grib#798
  • gha: bump for latest scitools/workflows nc-time-axis#506
  • gha: bump for latest scitools/workflows python-stratify#429
  • Update templates from SciTools/iris#7138 #266