Jupyter Developer Meetings

By: Gordon Fleetwood – ODSC data science team contributor

The IPython/Jupyter notebook is a staple of the Data Scientist's toolbox due its great visual and practical functionality. It turns out the minds behind this incredible platform have regular meetings which are available to watch on YouTube.

It's a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at what cool additions the developers are working on. Some of these include the nascent  Apache Toree project, splitting one notebook into two with the click of a button, easily injecting code from one notebook into another, adding to-do lists,and the exciting option to turn Jupyter notebooks into a dashboard or a web app.

This last idea could potentially be a game changer, especially in the Python ecosystem. Unlike R which has Shiny as a native application to build data-centric web apps, Python users have to adapt other tools.

Two of these are the web frameworks Django and Flask, and the more Shiny-esque DataSpyre and Pxyley, neither of which seem to have caught on that much. If Jupyter notebooks could become web apps with the click of a button, it could be the start of Shiny finding a worthy rival in the space.

While injecting code from another notebook may not be as superficially attractive as web apps, it would add important flexibility to a Data Scientist’s workflow. The ultimate goal seems to be enabling a person to import another notebook as easily as one would import a package.

Such functionality would allow different parts of analyses to be linked together seamlessly and allow for greater modularity.

Learn more about this topic and others like it at our Open Data Science Workshops, training sessions and conferences.

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