Hi everyone!
I’m Tharun MK, a 2nd-year AI & Data Science student. I’m really interested in applying for GSoC 2026 Project 2 (Update Brian documentation infrastructure).
I’ve been exploring the Brian 2 codebase over the last few days to figure out how the docs are currently built. To test things out and get a head start, I put together a local Proof of Concept (PoC) to migrate the examples over to ‘sphinx-gallery’.
I managed to get the HTML building locally with the raster plots rendering correctly (had to update some of the ‘plt’. syntax to make it work!). I just opened a Draft PR to show the initial setup here:
While looking through the repo history, I noticed that switching to ‘sphinx-gallery’ actually naturally solves a few older issues too:
Issue #610: The main migration from generate_examples.py.
Issue #171: Getting those clickable API links in the examples.
Issue #1754: Automating Jupyter/Colab notebook generation without needing a separate repo.
I also saw @thesamovar’s older comment about sphinx-gallery potentially clashing with the custom `briandoc’ extension. I’m currently studying the codebase so I can dedicate a specific phase of my GSoC timeline to fixing that exact compatibility roadblock.
I do have one quick architectural question for the mentors (@mstimberg) as I draft my proposal: For the new examples, do you prefer having detailed text explanations written directly inside the Python files using ‘# %%’ blocks (like I did in the PoC), or would you prefer the Python scripts to stay minimal with the text handled somewhere else?
Would love any early feedback from the community on my Draft PR approach! Thanks, and I’m looking forward to contributing more.
I have been working on the proposal and seeking for your feedback