Ask HN: Multiple people working in Python notebooks?

#1

Post by birdisthepass » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

I was part of a very cool data for good project this past weekend where hundreds of volunteers worked on visualizations and analyzing open data around specific questions.

This also meant everyone using their own Python notebooks, pushing their ETL and visualization code to Github, and then dropping a picture of the visualization output into a Goole doc or the shared Slack channel for everyone to see..

Is there a better way to handle this?

Re: Ask HN: Multiple people working in Python notebooks?

#2

Post by blakeburch » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

There are some collaborative notebook tools (Google Colab, CoCalc) but if you're dealing with hundreds of people working on their own notebooks, you'd likely still want a separate notebook for each individual... housed in a single folder.

In this case, you'd still have no good way to "see" what others had built without clicking into each notebook... and I think that's the problem that you're alluding to.

Re: Ask HN: Multiple people working in Python notebooks?

#3

Post by birdisthepass » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

blakeburch wrote: post #2

There are some collaborative notebook tools (Google Colab, CoCalc) but if you're dealing with hundreds of people working on their own notebooks, you'd likely still want a separate notebook for each individual... housed in a single folder. In this case, you'd still have no good way to "see" what others had built without clicking into each notebook... and I think that's the problem that you're alluding to.

Yup. That's exactly the issue I was alluding to. Would be great to be able to browse a central location with everyone's visualizations/outputs and then click into it to see the reproducible code that I could run. Maybe even let me run the code in a shared environment so that's it's ultra-reproducible.