The public work library
Explore real work from across the fields. Open the original, notice a useful technique, and take an idea into your next private attempt.
28 curated public examples
Code & software
Ronacher published a tolerant XML parser after earlier parsing approaches failed. He describes directing the initial implementation, reviewing it, requesting further fixes and an extensive test suite, and releasing the resulting library.
Analysis & finance
The notebook applies a 60-month rolling CAPM to technology-industry excess returns using Ken French’s factor and industry data. It displays coefficient tables, confidence-interval plots, and an expanding-window example.
Research & strategy
The guide projects Chicago community areas and grocery locations into a metric coordinate system, buffers stores by one kilometre, and displays intersection and difference maps. It defines coverage geometrically.
Math & science
The notebook joins Minnesota household and county data, fits pooled, unpooled and hierarchical radon models, and displays posterior diagnostics and comparisons. The partial-pooling plots show how estimates change with county sample size.
Writing & design
OpenAI works through furniture images from an Amazon product dataset, generating descriptions and then concise captions. Printed examples show how the product title identifies the intended item when an image contains several objects.
Operations & education
Software Carpentry’s lesson reads Gapminder country data and displays labeled GDP time-series and scatter plots. It shows table transposition, legends and file export, alongside learner exercises and accessibility guidance.
Everyday work
OpenAI’s notebook processes a real DevDay recap into frames and audio, then prints summaries and answers from visual input, audio-derived text, and both together. The differing outputs make missing context visible.
Code & software
Willison built a browser clipboard viewer while investigating rich-text paste. His public write-up links the code and conversation; the conversation shows requests to display available formats and then make long output easier to inspect.
Analysis & finance
The tutorial concatenates NO2 and particulate-measurement tables, shows row-count checks, and joins station coordinates and parameter descriptions. Displayed tables trace how the measurement dataset gains metadata.
Research & strategy
Hannah Ritchie’s analysis visualizes food emissions using Poore and Nemecek’s published meta-analysis. It separates livestock, crops, land use and supply-chain contributions, explaining category boundaries and the distinction between food-system and global totals.
Math & science
The SciPy example applies height, spacing, prominence and width conditions to a recorded ECG segment. It displays selected peaks, interval arrays and property values, making each filtering choice inspectable.
Writing & design
Glaser published an experiment in which models generated an SVG, inspected a rasterized rendering, and iterated. His before-and-after results were mixed: several models added detail without fixing the underlying composition.
Operations & education
GitLab’s postmortem reconstructs its January 2017 production-database outage, failed backup paths, and recovery from an earlier snapshot. It documents unrecoverable changes and traces follow-up work to monitoring, recovery testing, runbooks and operational ownership.
Everyday work
OpenAI summarizes a Wikipedia article about artificial intelligence using different chunk counts and a detail parameter. The notebook prints summaries and their lengths, including a recursive variant that supplies earlier summaries as context.
Code & software
OpenAI publishes a multi-step test-writing notebook with a concrete Pig Latin function and generated pytest cases. Several printed expected values conflict with the function, making this a worked example of why generated tests themselves need review.
Analysis & finance
Using Australian quarterly beer-production data, the book compares mean, naïve, and seasonal-naïve forecasts against later observations. Its displayed example shows the seasonal baseline following the observed pattern more closely.
Research & strategy
The Markup analyzes 2019 mortgage-application records with logistic regression and publishes adjusted disparities. Its methodology documents selection rules, model variables, missing credit-score information and limitations of the available public data.
Math & science
The tutorial opens a Horsehead Nebula FITS image, displays its dimensions, statistics, histogram and alternative stretches, then sums M13 images and writes the resulting FITS file.
Writing & design
Sloan built an Atom editor plugin offering inline completions from a recurrent neural network trained on old magazine text. His public account describes the working interaction and concludes that its creative effects did not yet justify the effort.
Operations & education
GitHub’s report traces an October 2018 network partition through database failover, inconsistent replicas, recovery and delayed background processing. The timeline explains why responders prioritized data integrity and why early recovery estimates proved unreliable.
Everyday work
Willison published bounding-box outputs and visual tools for locating objects in images. When boxes appeared rotated, he investigated image orientation metadata, tested a different image representation, and documented a preprocessing fix.
Code & software
Carlini describes supervising parallel Claude agents building a C compiler. When agents collided on Linux build failures, he introduced comparisons with GCC and tighter regression checks to isolate faults and divide the remaining work.
Analysis & finance
Robert Andrew Martin’s guide transforms historical share prices into return and covariance estimates, prints optimized portfolio weights, and demonstrates regularization and integer-share allocation. Its performance figures are model estimates.
Math & science
The example loads a SWAP solar image, defines crop corners with SkyCoord in the map’s coordinate frame, and displays the cropped region with a solar limb and coordinate grid.
Writing & design
With the author’s permission, OpenAI demonstrates translating Milan Mitrović’s Euclidean Plane Geometry from Slovenian into English. The notebook provides chunking code and a printed translation while attempting to retain the manuscript’s LaTeX structure.
Everyday work
Willison describes creating a QR decoder when he lacked his phone during a meeting. The linked conversation shows an initial URL-based implementation followed by a request for file selection, drag-and-drop and pasted images.
Code & software
Aider published code-editing benchmark results for an architect model that describes a solution and an editor model that converts it into file changes. The report compares paired configurations with solo baselines and discusses latency tradeoffs.
Code & software
Willison published Python utilities made with a Claude Project configured to include inline dependencies. His HTML-to-text server example includes the prompt, generated source and conversation, showing how a short implementation pattern shaped a concrete deliverable.