Here is one thing you have probably not heard of: a workshop on Open Source Forecasting software, held in Beijing on 26th – 27th June 2025. This was a closed event, with speakers attending by invitation only. It focused on recent advancements and potential avenues in open-source forecasting software. But why am I writing about it if it has already passed and was closed?

First things first, the event was organised by Mitchell O’Hara, Xiaoqian Wang, Bahman Rostami-Tabar, Azul Garza, Resul Akay, Shanika Wickramasuriya and me. My contribution was acting as the programme chair of the workshop and helping invite some speakers. The event was sponsored by the International Institute of Forecasters, and you can find some information about it on the following website. The workshop lasted for two days, and there were several great talks delivered by excellent speakers (see the full programme here).

But among those, there were two talks especially important to me personally, because they were related to the smooth package:

1. by Kandrika Pritularga, explaining the core of the package, the maths behind it, and how it works,
2. by Filotas Theodosiou, who explained his excellent work on translating the smooth R code to Python.

Yes, you’ve heard correctly! We have finally had some progress translating the smooth package from R to Python (done between Filotas, Leonidas Tsaprounis and me. I’m a vibe coder now! :D). The Python code is available in this GitHub branch, and we now even have a description of the package structure and function flow (thanks to Fil and his AI friends).

It’s still a work in progress, and there’s lots to do, but it’s an important step for us. We plan to continue working on it, and there are already several people who have started helping us with the translation. So, stay tuned – great times are coming!