Jupyter Insights: Carol Willing, director of the Python Software Foundation
Jupyter as a learning tool, the JupyterHub Project, and Music21.
Paint palette. (source: PublicDomainPictures.net)
Carol Willing is a director of the Python Software Foundation, a Jupyter Steering Council member, and a geek in residence at FabLab San Diego, where she teaches wearable electronics and software development.
Below, Willing shares her thoughts on the current and future state of Jupyter. She will also be speaking at JupyterCon, August 22-25, 2017, in New York City.
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1. How has Jupyter changed the way you work?
Jupyter Notebooks changed the way I learn new concepts, languages, and libraries. For example, I’m currently learning Julia, and I like the ability to combine prose, code snippets, and YouTube video snippets in the same notebook document as notes while I am learning.
Jupyter has also helped me when teaching a workshop. The notebooks give my students the ability to relax, listen, and interact with the material with confidence since they know the notebooks will be a handy takeaway from the workshop.
2. How does Jupyter change the way your team works? How does it alter the dynamics of collaboration?
As one of the Project Jupyter developers, I frequently use Jupyter. I’ve found that the ability to rapidly prototype and document ideas in the same notebook to be particularly handy. I can work out the basic concepts and easily share with my team.
3. How do you expect Jupyter to be extended in the coming year?
One of the projects I am actively working on is JupyterHub. JupyterHub enables a person or organization to host notebook servers for a group of users. We are working very hard to improve the installation, configuration, and management of JupyterHub to make it easier to deploy and begin serving users.
Beyond the many technical enhancements across all the Jupyter projects (which you can learn about from our project roadmaps, mailing list, and newsletters), the Jupyter team expects to extend the wonderful work already being done by the Jupyter community. We’re providing ways for the community to share their projects, best practices, and talents. Education and research are so important to the team, and we want to actively encourage our community to collaborate and share their ideas.
4. What will you be talking about at JupyterCon?
Formally, I’ll be talking about JupyterHub, engaging new learners through music using the music21 library and TensorFlow, and how Jupyter tools can be used to create rich, interactive documents. Informally, I will be chatting with attendees and newcomers about how they are using Jupyter and what they are trying to accomplish using Jupyter. I love the hallway track and listening to all the wonderful ideas that others have.
5. What sessions are you looking forward to seeing at JupyterCon?
Can I answer “All of them!”? If I must choose a few, since my xkcd conference attendee replicator will likely not be released by August, I am looking forward to:
- A billion stars in the Jupyter Notebook, by Maarten Breddels. Maarten has been doing fantastic work with 3D visualization and interactivity in documentation for projects and research.
- Collaboration and automated operation as literate computing for reproducible infrastructure, by Yoshi Nobu Masatani, who is doing wonderful work with Jupyter and DevOps to create infrastructure that enables reproducible science.
- Using Jupyter at the intersection of robots and industrial biology, by Marc Colangelo, Justin Nand, and Danelle Chou. This looks like a fascinating combination of robots, software, and biology to improve collaboration between software engineers and scientists.
I’m really looking forward to JupyterCon. See you there.