Amit Rathi
Amit is a software developer & the founder of ReviewNB, a code review tool for Jupyter Notebooks.
He's a Carnegie Mellon graduate, previously worked at Amazon Music team in Seattle & helped build location stack at HyperTrack.
Amit is a strong proponent of automated testing & code reviews as they help us quickly build reliable software & learn from each other. He's deeply interested in the human side of software engineering- development processes, collaboration tools, and such.
Sessions
Key Takeaways
- What is notebook code review & why should Jupyter users care
- How to build rich diffs & commenting for notebooks
- How to integrate notebook diff & commenting with version control platforms like GitHub & Bitbucket
Summary
For the past 4+ years, I’ve built a notebook code review experience (ReviewNB) for GitHub as a solo bootstrapped developer. Thousands of organizations now use the service, including Apple, Airbnb, Lyft, Deloitte, Affirm, AWS, Meta Reality Labs, and NASA JPL.
This talk focuses on behind-the-scenes technical details such as,
- Challenges of building rich notebook diffs on top of GitHub / Bitbucket
- handling JSON diffs
- handling images, plots & other rich outputs
- Challenges of building discussion / commenting functionality for notebooks
- where & how to store notebook comments
- how to handle comments when underlying notebook changes
Summary
Today, Jupyter Notebooks are mostly confined to science, research & education. But notebooks can provide organizations with a powerful general-purpose “executable documentation” platform. A solid use case for this is DevOps & more specifically, IT incident response.
Technology teams usually have an on-call rotation with static wiki-style documentation to guide the on-call engineer. Jupyter Notebooks can replace static documentation with executable notebooks. E.g. “fetch service logs” and “rollback last deployment” can simply mean executing a code cell that’s available alongside the markdown instructions.
What are the benefits of executable vs. static documentation for DevOps -
- Quick e.g. “check DB latency” is 1-click notebook code cell execution to plot latency graph vs. going to a third-party UI in the middle of an incidence
- Precise e.g. “promote read replica to master” can mean a series of steps & possibility of human error; codifying the steps in advance removes ambiguity & results in precise action.
“Executable documentation” is a simple yet powerful concept that can extend to other use cases such as - API documentation, developer onboarding, data visualization & reporting, scheduling routine tasks & so on. Think of it as executable GoogleDocs powered by Jupyter!
In this talk, we’d like to,
- Introduce the concept of Jupyter powered “executable documentation” platform, particularly for DevOps and Incident Response,
- Show a demo of how it’d work - (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvLXSAHCGF8)
- Talk about important challenges, and propose a way forward to make this a mainstream application of Jupyter notebooks.