2026-07-15 –, Johnson Great Room
Upgrading your organization’s dependencies on open source libraries can be daunting. Major version releases promise bug fixes, new features, and security improvements, but these upgrades often require so much more work than just bumping a few numbers and letting your package manager sort out the rest.
From planning to deployment, this talk is a step-by-step guide to upgrading your dependencies on open source libraries. We will offer practical strategies for scoping, coordinating, debugging, testing, releasing, and communicating major version upgrades -- all with as little pain for developers and users as possible.
Whether you're maintaining internal extensions, forking core packages, or just trying to stay current, you'll learn real-world strategies to make major upgrades less painful, and maybe even routine.
Major dependency upgrades are daunting, and the tail of downstream projects and end-user organizations putting them off is always long.
Developers often find good reasons to delay major upgrades of dependencies. Resources are scarce, managers may see more value in introducing new features or fixing active bugs, and upgrading comes with the risk of regressions.
However, delaying major upgrades hurts everyone:
- Users must wait for security fixes and new features
- Developers who put off upgrades end up facing a mountain of changes to simultaneously research, implement, test, and release
- Upstream maintainers must choose between dropping support for still-popular versions or devoting resources to trying to maintain every version under the sun by backporting fixes to old branches
Faster, more timely upgrade adoption means more platform stability for everyone.
In this talk, we’ll share lessons learned from years of major upgrades to our platform’s dependencies on Jupyter ecosystem projects (Lab, Widgets, Server, Voila). We aim to provide attendees the strategies -- and confidence -- they need to tackle the next big upgrade long before the typical end-of-maintenance scramble.
Rebecca Ely has been involved with Bloomberg’s adoption of open source technologies since 2016. In 2022, Ely joined both the Jupyter Frontends (formerly JupyterLab) Council and the Jupyter Accessibility Council. Ely’s 2015 career transition into tech was preceded by roles as a federal acquisition consultant, math and science teacher, and service monkey trainer. Ely holds a bachelor's degree in peace and justice studies from Wellesley College.
Balaji Sundaram has been a software engineer at Bloomeberg since 2018, where he works on a team that builds and maintains JupyterLab extensions for data analysis in BQuant. Prior to joining Bloomberg, Balaji worked on building greenfield products for a consulting firm. Balaji holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from North Carolina State University.
Shruti Sapre has been a software engineer at Bloomberg since 2022, where she works on a team that builds and maintains JupyterLab extensions for data analysis in BQuant. Before joining Bloomberg, she worked on static analysis tools for MATLAB. She holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of Southern California, and a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Pune.