Zilong Liang / Hack Notes on Mar 19, 2026
OpenAI to acquire Astral1. This one is big. uv, Ruff, and ty are all best-in-class tools from Astral that have significantly improved the Python developer experience. After the acquisition, the Astral team will join OpenAI’s Codex team. Given how quickly Codex has been improving recently, this feels like a strong combination for the future of developer tooling.
Here’s the blog post from Astral’s side: Astral to join OpenAI. Here’s the Hacker News discussion.
Another interesting angle is that Anthropic acquired Bun last year. Anthropic now has deep JS/TS tooling expertise, while OpenAI is making a similar move around Python.
Update Mar 20, 2026: Simon Willison published a detailed post on this acquisition: Thoughts on OpenAI acquiring Astral and uv/ruff/ty.
I just finished a fairly big notes-navigation refresh for both https://tech.zlliang.me and https://days.zlliang.me. Archive pages by year, month, and day are now fully in place, and the sidebar now has a “Writing journey” heatmap.
This makes the notes feel much easier to browse as a body of work instead of a flat reverse-chronological list. For example, visit /notes/2026 for notes in 2026, /notes/2026/03 for notes in March 2026, and /notes/2026/03/19 for notes on Mar 19, 2026. Each cell in the heatmap takes you to the archive page for that specific day.
The "Writing journey" heatmap in the sidebar, with links to archive pages by year available from the main /notes archive page
A monthly archive page, where you can switch to other months or jump to a specific day in the current month
The work happened in two commits: zlliang/zlliang@9ed325f and zlliang/zlliang@9786f32. Most of the implementation was done with help from the Codex app and Amp.
Update Mar 30, 2026: In late March, I renamed my two journal websites. They are now Hack https://hack.zlliang.me and Muse https://muse.zlliang.me. See: Renamed the two journal websites to Hack and Muse.