The application period for the Google Summer of Code 2023 starts on March 20th (full timeline for GSoC 2023). With this post we give some general information about the ideal contributor application from our point of view. The recommendations we give here hold for all of the proposed projects, but we will also try to give information specific to the respective projects in the corresponding neurostars threads. For a full list of Brian-related projects, see the end of this post.

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The application period for the Google Summer of Code 2022 starts on April 4th (full timeline for GSoC 2022). With this post we give some general information about the ideal contributor application from our point of view. The recommendations we give here hold for all of the proposed projects, but we will also try to give information specific to the respective projects in the corresponding neurostars threads. For a full list of Brian-related projects, see the end of this post.

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It took us a while, but we are very happy to finally announce a new release, Brian 2.5 🎉. This release comes with a large number of bug fixes, various small improvements to the C++ code generation process, new examples and improved documentation, as well as a more powerful “generator syntax” for synapse generation. In particular, it is now possible to generate a fixed number of synapses randomly – either for each pre-synaptic or for each post-synaptic cell. We have also updated our build and testing infrastructure, and now provide binary pip-installable packages for all platforms, including the fancy new Apple hardware. Please let us know if you run into any issues!

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This is the second article in the “bug hunt” series. In these articles, I go through a recent bug in Brian (or one of its dependencies) and describe all the steps I used to find the source of the bug and how I fixed it.

Today’s bug is about a strangely named file that seemingly appears out of nowhere when running Brian simulations. The final fix for the bug will turn out to be a single character change in the Brian code base 😀!

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This article starts a new series of blog posts about “bug hunts”. In these articles, I will go through a recent bug in Brian (or one of its dependencies) and describe all the steps I used to find the source of the bug and how I fixed it. I will try to not only focus on the Brian-side of things, but also show some general tools like git bisect or “monkey patching” that can be helpful to find the source of these nasty critters (no actual bugs were harmed during the making of this blog post).

Let’s start! Today’s bug will be about equations, and more specifically about their LaTeX representation. As most of you probably know, Brian can represent equations, quantities, etc. in LaTeX. This representation can then either be included in a LaTeX document or directly rendered for example as the output in jupyter notebooks.

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Marcel Stimberg will talk about Brian’s development process in a live developer session on Thursday, Feb 11 2021, 17:00 UTC (check local time). For more information and the link to the Zoom session see the announcement.

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In these very particular times, we are nevertheless happy to announce a new release, Brian 2.4. This release fixes a large number of bugs and includes a number of small improvements. As announced with the previous release, Brian 2.4 is the first release that no longer supports Python 2. For a full list of changes, see the release notes. We recommend all users of Brian 2 to update.

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Happy New Year to all Brian users 🎉! We are happy to announce a new release, Brian 2.3. This release fixes a number of bugs and introduces some new features. It also paves the way for the transition from Python 2 to Python 3 – given that Python 2 is now no longer officially supported, Brian 2.3 will be the last release to support Python 2. For a full list of changes, see the release notes. We recommend all users of Brian 2 to update.

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