Current

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

Why lint commits with Cocogitto

We use continuous delivery processes on our products based on Conventional Commits. This lists why we use Cocogitto to check our commit messages during continuous…

May 26, 2026
Why Cocogitto for semantic release

Continuous delivery through using semantic releases reduces manual effort, time, and potential errors. This post describes why we use Cocogitto for automated versioning and…

May 26, 2026
Why git-cliff for changelog generation

Automatically generating a changelog can save a lot of administrative time, especially for a small group like ours. This post explains our reasons for using git-cliff to…

May 22, 2026
Why rumdl?

Code formatting tools are commonly used in software projects. However, Markdown formatting isn’t nearly as common, mainly because of limited tools. This post explains why we…

Feb 19, 2026
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 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 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
Why Frictionless Data

Why we choose to use the Frictionless Data standard for structuring metadata and data.

Jul 15, 2024
Conventional branches

Our reasons for using conventional branch names.

Jun 8, 2024
Why choose Semantic Versioning (SemVer) for software

Our reasons for using SemVer for versioning the releases of our software projects.

May 24, 2024
Why atomic commits and pull requests

Our reasons for using atomic commits and pull requests in our projects.

May 14, 2024
Why conventional commits (with optional emojis)

Our reasons for using conventional commits (with optional emojis following the Gitmoji convention) across Seedcase repositories.

May 14, 2024
Why GitHub flow

Our reasons for using the GitHub flow as our branching and development strategy.

Feb 15, 2024
Why uv

Python projects need a tool to manage dependencies and virtual environments. This post describes our reasons for using uv for those tasks.

Jan 29, 2024
Why poly-repo

Our reasons for structuring projects (both software and websites) in a poly-repo rather than mono-repo style.

Dec 5, 2023
Why Ruff

Enforcing style of code with automatic linters and formatters is important for code reviews to focus on content, not style. This post covers the reasons why we decided on…

Nov 27, 2023
Why GitHub Projects

As a project grows, it becomes both more important and more difficult to keep track of where the project is at. This can be helped by using visualisation and project…

Nov 23, 2023
Why standardized snippets

The larger a project is, the more important it becomes to have a joint set of standards when writing documentation. We decided to set up shortcuts that are shared across…

Nov 23, 2023
Why Discord

Our reasons for using Discord as our communication platform.

Jun 25, 2023
Why Quarto

Our reasons for using Quarto to build the website and write the general documentation.

Jun 25, 2023
Why an MIT License

Open and permissive licensing of copyrighted content is a way to increase use of a software product, ease collaboration and re-use, and share intellectual ideas with others.…

Apr 1, 2023
Why Python

Python is one of the most common and widely used programming languages. As it is used across multiple domains and industries, it is likely to be familiar to a wider…

Mar 22, 2023
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