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Tuesday Oct. 13, 2020, 4:15 p.m.–Oct. 13, 2020, 4:45 p.m. in Jupyter Community: Practices

How to avoid 'Death by Jupyter Notebooks' - Towards more effective and educational notebooks

Julia Wagemann

Audience level:
Intermediate

Brief Summary

Using Jupyter Notebooks is easy, but developing Jupyter notebooks that are effective and educational for others is not so easy. This talk will guide you through a set of principles to make Jupyter notebooks more educational and enjoyable for others. Concepts that will be covered are modularisation, leveraging html functionalities and converging content in an index notebook.

Outline

This talk aims to advocate for more ‘educational’ and enjoyable notebooks. Getting started with and using Jupyter Notebooks is easy and the sheer amount of Jupyter notebooks on Github is a testimony of it. However, just because one is using Jupyter notebooks does not mean that the workflow and code is understandable and structured at the same time. Making Jupyter notebooks more effective and educational for the community requires additional time, but with the help of key concepts it can easily be implemented. This talk aims to motivate you to go the extra mile and to contribute towards more effective and organised notebooks.

The talk will start with examples of notebooks that are missing some of the key concepts and for this reason often end up being unstructured, messy and boring. After the introduction, I would like to share with you some key concepts I am using to develop Jupyter-based tutorials and workshops and that can be applied to make notebooks more effective and educational. Some concepts that will be highlighted: * How to best organise notebooks * How to leverage HTML functionalities * How to add a table of contents * How to add a navigation pane * How to modularise jupyter notebooks

This talk is for beginners and experts alike and does not have any specific pre-requisites. The talk primarily features the concepts used while developing a Jupyter-based learning tool for atmospheric composition data (https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/urls/gitlab.eumetsat.int/eumetlab/atmosphere/atmosphere/-/raw/master/00_index_ltpy.ipynb)

Go the extra mile and invest some additional time to make your notebooks more educational and enjoyable for others. Especially if you use notebooks to collaborate in teams or in a teaching environment.

The application of simple principles will make the use of Jupyter notebooks more enjoyable and effective for the entire community.