Happy devs and happy patrons: the wonders of "uv".
If I had to pick one work tool that has contributed most to my quality-of-coding-life and joyful surprise over the last year, I think it’d be uv.
One could say that uv is a python package manager, which wouldn’t be wrong, but certainly doesn’t capture joyful surprise. In this talk, I’d like to share how our Brown University Library team:
- began experimenting with
uv - initially adopted it in a very safe, familiar way
- later began using it in a less familiar, but incredibly useful way
I’ll share a few tips, lessons-learned, challenges uv has solved, and features it has enabled.
But the real joyful surprise I’d like to share is from a more recent uv feature: it enables a new way we can be really helpful to our colleagues and patrons who may not have an interest in writing code, but who would love to use our useful tools.
Paired with GitHub, we can publish all sorts of very useful utilities easily (via a github.io site) – which users can run locally, with a one-line uv command, with no virtual-environment/dependency headaches. Think: gathering theses & dissertations for collections-as-data work, spaCy named-entity-recognition, etc.