Keep the gradient flowing

scikit-learn 0.9

Last week we released a new version of scikit-learn. The Changelog is particularly impressive, yet personally this release is important for other reasons. This will probably be my last release as a paid engineer. I'm starting a PhD next month, and although I plan to continue contributing to the project and make a few more releases, I will certainly have less time to devote to it. Luckily, I received a lot of help from the community while preparing the release, from Changelog writing to build of Windows binaries, thus I expect the transition to go smoothly. Almost two years have elapsed since the first 0.1 release. During this time, we did a lot of refactoring and broke the API several times. However, I've seen some concerns about API stability both at the EuroScipy conference and in the mailing list where I’ve realized we need to provide an API that does not break in every release, and do this in a way that the project remains fun for developers. That's why I'm extremely glad to see that although this release is big in changes, these have been made in a more organized manner. Yes, we've broken the API once again, but now there's a compatibility layer that ensures that code written for 0.8 will continue working with the new release.