It was probably one of the Turtle robots or a derivative of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(robot)

One later variant is the Valiant Roamer https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/30545/Valiant-Roamer...

For context, this article has probably been posted as it is linked to by the "Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?" blog post [1] currently being discussed [2].

[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49654229

Possibly grist https://www.getgrist.com/blog/grist-v-airtable/ ?

FYI, Grist has a very good Airtable migration tool. Brings over column types, references, simple formulas, attachments etc: https://www.getgrist.com/airtable-alternative-self-hosted/

I agree that the text is unpleasant to read.

I also dislike the title ("What we learned when a user tried to load a massive GML file in a browser") - it's hard to imagine that someone who had tried to build a viewer for geospatial data would not already know the answer (paraphrasing, "tiling the data will be necessary to achieve acceptable performance, and there are standard methods to do this")

This one's website (and a dead comment replying to you) suggests that processing the PDF in the browser, rather than uploading to a server, is a point of differentiation.

However, there are older tools that do this, such as BentoPDF (which is also open source) [1].

[1]: https://www.bentopdf.com/

It makes API requests to api.soot.com (and the rendered page includes a div with id "soot-publication").

The soot site is a bit vague about their product: https://spiral.soot.com/

I've previously encountered a similar product with much clearer marketing and documentation pages called Zegami: https://zegami.com/

I was about to link to the same "What's on the Menu" site, which I remembered being an impressive site for library digitization project years ago, but it was apparently retired in January 2025.

Now [1] redirects to [2], essentially an About page with links to the data.

[1]: https://menus.nypl.org

[2]: https://www.nypl.org/research/support/whats-on-the-menu

[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241222134751/https://menus.nyp...

To be fair we were done transcribing and double verifying in about 2015. We’d get a batch of new menus from the imaging team, tweet it and no matter the size it’d be gone in about an hour.

I think this is a joke referencing Franz Kafka's short story The Metamorphosis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis

Correct.

> a new python plotting library

Whilst it's still not yet at 1.0.0, it's not that new: the first (0.1.0) release was in 2017: https://pypi.org/project/plotnine/#history

matplotlib's first release was in 2003, making it more than twice as old.

Plotnine is heavily inspired by the ggplot2 library, which uses the + operator in the same way: https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/#usage