Project
Spyder
Summary
Much of the content and screenshots/GIFs in the Spyder documentation need a comprehensive update for the substantial new features and UI changes in Spyder 6.0, and more will be needed for the forthcoming Spyder 6.1 version, to be released in a few months. Therefore, we will take this opportunity for a thorough review of the current documentation, add and update the text to reflect new and changed features, enhance the website UI as well as implement modern documentation standards, remaster its screenshots/GIFs to be of higher quality and in modern formats, and upgrade the supporting infrastructure to streamline future updates.
Submitter
C.A.M. Gerlach
Project lead
@ccordoba12
Community benefit
While we don’t collect telemetry from the documentation website itself to respect user privacy, our handful of embedded YouTube tutorial videos alone report more than one million unique views over the past few years. Therefore, modern, up to date Spyder documentation with accurate, comprehensive content and high-quality screenshots and recordings will both help our existing hundreds of thousands of users (per our ~500k+ monthly downloads across all media and millions of Anaconda installations) make the most of Spyder, and ensure it is accessible to the many learners, beginners and new users around the world.
Additionally, the new content will focus on the extensive and evolving suite of remote development features being built into Spyder 6, to help users discover, utilize and take full advantage of these capabilities. This is critical to enable getting these years worth of advancements into the hands of the users we built them for, and put to good use.
Finally, the website’s infrastructure upgrades, usability improvements and standardization implemented as part of this process will help ensure that documentation is a more seamless part of new Spyder versions, and streamline the workflow involved in future such updates. Additionally, we expect to help contribute at least some of these improvements upstream to the Pydata-Sphinx-Theme and potentially other widely-used projects (such as shared automation tooling that has been discussed with other maintainers), benefiting the entire NumFOCUS community.
Amount requested
10000
Execution plan
Timeline and detailed task breakdown
Month 1*
Month 2
Month 3
Month 4
*Can be started as soon as August 2025
Project team and personnel budget
C.A.M. Gerlach, Spyder core developer and docs maintainer: Manager, writer, reviewer, infra
Andres Montoya, Spyder UI/UX designer and web developer: Screenshots, GIFs and UI/web
Carlos Cordoba, Spyder lead maintainer: Subject matter expert
16 weeks * 10 hours/week * $50/hour = $8000 for CAM (writing, review, infra, management)
16 weeks * 5 hours/week * $25/hour = $2000 for Andres (screenshot and GIF creation, design)
(Carlos will contribute his expertise without additional funding under this particular grant)
Project
Spyder
Summary
Much of the content and screenshots/GIFs in the Spyder documentation need a comprehensive update for the substantial new features and UI changes in Spyder 6.0, and more will be needed for the forthcoming Spyder 6.1 version, to be released in a few months. Therefore, we will take this opportunity for a thorough review of the current documentation, add and update the text to reflect new and changed features, enhance the website UI as well as implement modern documentation standards, remaster its screenshots/GIFs to be of higher quality and in modern formats, and upgrade the supporting infrastructure to streamline future updates.
Submitter
C.A.M. Gerlach
Project lead
@ccordoba12
Community benefit
While we don’t collect telemetry from the documentation website itself to respect user privacy, our handful of embedded YouTube tutorial videos alone report more than one million unique views over the past few years. Therefore, modern, up to date Spyder documentation with accurate, comprehensive content and high-quality screenshots and recordings will both help our existing hundreds of thousands of users (per our ~500k+ monthly downloads across all media and millions of Anaconda installations) make the most of Spyder, and ensure it is accessible to the many learners, beginners and new users around the world.
Additionally, the new content will focus on the extensive and evolving suite of remote development features being built into Spyder 6, to help users discover, utilize and take full advantage of these capabilities. This is critical to enable getting these years worth of advancements into the hands of the users we built them for, and put to good use.
Finally, the website’s infrastructure upgrades, usability improvements and standardization implemented as part of this process will help ensure that documentation is a more seamless part of new Spyder versions, and streamline the workflow involved in future such updates. Additionally, we expect to help contribute at least some of these improvements upstream to the Pydata-Sphinx-Theme and potentially other widely-used projects (such as shared automation tooling that has been discussed with other maintainers), benefiting the entire NumFOCUS community.
Amount requested
10000
Execution plan
Timeline and detailed task breakdown
Month 1*
:doc:linksMonth 2
Month 3
Month 4
*Can be started as soon as August 2025
Project team and personnel budget
C.A.M. Gerlach, Spyder core developer and docs maintainer: Manager, writer, reviewer, infra
Andres Montoya, Spyder UI/UX designer and web developer: Screenshots, GIFs and UI/web
Carlos Cordoba, Spyder lead maintainer: Subject matter expert
16 weeks * 10 hours/week * $50/hour = $8000 for CAM (writing, review, infra, management)
16 weeks * 5 hours/week * $25/hour = $2000 for Andres (screenshot and GIF creation, design)
(Carlos will contribute his expertise without additional funding under this particular grant)