Current

These decision posts reflect the decisions we currently adhere to. All our decisions adhere to our values and principles.

Why Git LFS

Data Packages contain research data that is often large in size and may be sensitive in nature. Storing this data securely and tracking changes over time reliably is…

Jan 28, 2026
Why Cyclopts for Python CLIs

Python isn’t natively designed to build command line interfaces (CLIs), so we need to choose a package to help us build them. In this post, we describe why we chose Cyclopts.

Jan 26, 2026
Why the Diataxis framework for documentation

The difference between software that is used and not used is often the

quality of the documentation. This post describes why we chose the Diataxis framework for writing our…

Jan 26, 2026
Why use (mainly) Kanban and iterative and incremental development

Developing software can be done many ways, especially when working in a team. Here we describe why we chose to mix aspects of Kanban with an iterative and incremental…

Jan 12, 2026
Why mypy

Static type checking helps to catch bugs earlier and contributes to the long-term maintainability and overall quality of Python codebases. This post explains why we chose…

Dec 18, 2025
Why Copier

Configuration drift is a major problem when managing multiple repositories. This post describes why we chose Copier as our tool for managing configurations in existing…

Aug 5, 2025
Why CC0 for data

Given that we work with and manage data, having a license for the data can be helpful. This post discusses why we recommend (and use) the CC0 license for data.

Aug 1, 2025
Why Parquet

The format of the file for storing data directly impacts how it is used later. Parquet is a format that has very good compressed file sizes, is very fast to process and…

Mar 10, 2025
Why Markdown

This post describes our reasons for using the markup language Markdown for documentation.

Feb 28, 2025
Why Polars

The key to useful and meaningful data is data that is good quality and tidy. Getting data to be tidy and higher quality is an often undervalued and underestimated activity…

Dec 4, 2024
Why Commitizen for changelog generation

Our reasons for using Commitizen to auto-generate changelogs.

Nov 22, 2024
Why Pandera

A key functionality of Sprout is checking whether user-supplied data match the metadata that describe them. This post explains why we chose to use pandera for automating…

Nov 8, 2024
Why Commitizen for semantic release

The reasons we use Commitizen for automated versioning and releasing of our software.

Nov 8, 2024
Why jsonschema

As we follow the Data Package standard for structuring metadata, we have to make sure that our metadata files conform to this standard. This post explains why we chose…

Nov 7, 2024
Why FigJam for retrospectives

Our reasons for using FigJam for our retrospectives.

Oct 25, 2024
Why lint with commitizen

Reasons to use commitizen to lint our commit messages to follow the Conventional Commits standard.

Oct 25, 2024
Why quartodocs

Our reasons for using quartodocs to build Python function and class documentation from docstrings into a website.

Oct 24, 2024
Why Pytest

Testing software is a requirement for ensuring it works as intended and because we use a test-driven development workflow. This post explains why we choose to use pytest…

Jul 17, 2024
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