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Computable Content with
Jupyter, Docker, Mesos
Strata+HW Singapore
2016-12-07
Paco Nathan, @pacoid
Director, Learning Group @ O’Reilly Media
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Project Jupyter

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Project Jupyter is the evolution of iPython notebooks,
applied to a range of different programming languages
and environments
https://jupyter.org/
https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/IPython-
kernels-for-other-languages
Some history…

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Download Anaconda:
continuum.io/downloads
Activate the environment needed:
source activate py3k
Launch Juypter:
jupyter notebook
An example notebook (requires installs; see notes):
github.com/ceteri/oriole_jupyterday_atl/blob/master/example.ipynb
Installation and launch using Anaconda

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text = '''
The titular threat of The Blob has always struck me as the ultimate movie
monster: an insatiably hungry, amoeba-like mass able to penetrate
virtually any safeguard, capable of--as a doomed doctor chillingly
describes it--"assimilating flesh on contact.
Snide comparisons to gelatin be damned, it's a concept with the most
devastating of potential consequences, not unlike the grey goo scenario
proposed by technological theorists fearful of
artificial intelligence run rampant.
'''
from textblob import TextBlob
blob = TextBlob(text)
print(blob.tags)
print(blob.noun_phrases)
Installation and launch using Anaconda

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At its core, one can think of Jupyter as a suite
of network protocols:
Jupyter is to the remote semantics of a REPL
as…
HTTP is to the remote semantics of file share
A suite of network protocols

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An excellent team

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JupyterHub
github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub
Jupyter in Education
groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/jupyter-education
JupyterLab (alpha preview)
github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab
Jupyter Kernels
github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/IPython-kernels-for-other-languages
Projects:

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documentation
jupyter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
discussions
groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/jupyter
gitter.im/jupyter/jupyter
events
calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?
src=p51j0ac1iccmj44tae12hq4dk0%40group.calendar.google.com
Resources:

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speaking of upcoming events, stay tuned for …
JupyterCon
Resources:

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Computable Content

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An observation…

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Jupyter @ O’Reilly Media
Embracing Jupyter Notebooks at O'Reilly
oreilly.com/ideas/jupyter-at-oreilly
Learn alongside innovators, thought-by-thought, in context
oreilly.com/ideas/oreilly-oriole-learn-alongside-innovators-
thought-by-thought-in-context
Oriole Online Tutorials
safaribooksonline.com/oriole/
How Do You Learn?
oreilly.com/learning/how-do-you-learn

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For example…
• A unique new medium blends code,
data, text, and video into a narrated
learning experience with computable
content
• Purely browser-based UX; zero
installation required
• Substantially higher engagement
metrics
• Opens the door for live coding
in assessments
• GitHub lists over 300K public
Jupyter notebooks
Regex Golf by Peter Norvig
oreilly.com/learning/regex-golf-
with-peter-norvig

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Motivations
O’Reilly needed a way for authors to use Jupyter notebooks to create
professional publications. We also wanted to integrate video narration
into the UX. The result is a unique new medium called Oriole:
• Jupyter notebooks are used in the middleware
• each viewer gets a 100% HTML experience
(no download/install needed)
• context as a “unit of thought”
• the code and video are sync’ed together
• each web session has a Docker container running in the cloud

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Motivations
Innovators in programming, data science, dev ops, design, etc., tend to
be really busy people. Tutorials are now much quicker to publish than
“traditional” books and videos. The audience gets direct, hands-on,
contextualized experience across a wide variety of programming
environments.

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A notebook, a container, and ~20 minutes of
informal video walk into a bar...

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Literate Programming, Don Knuth
literateprogramming.com/
Paraphrased:
Instead of telling computers what to do, tell other
people what you want the computers to do
Some history

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Wolfram Research introduced notebooks in 1988
for working with Mathematica…
Some history

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PyCon 2016 Keynote, Lorena Barba
youtu.be/ckW1xuGVpug?t=35m11s (video)
figshare.com/articles/PyCon2016_Keynote/3407779 (slides)
Highly recommended: speech acts (based
on Winograd and Flores) as theory for what
we’re doing here
More recently

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Notebook Practice

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• focus on a concise “unit of thought”
• invest the time and editorial effort to create a good intro
• keep your narrative simple and reasonably linear
• “chunk” the text and code into understandable parts
• alternate between text, code, output, further links, etc.
• use markdown for interesting links: background, deep-dive, etc.
• code cells shouldn’t be long (< 10 lines), must show output
• load data+libraries from the container, not the network
• clear all output then “Run All” – or it didn’t happen
• video narratives: there’s text, and there’s subtext...
• pause after each “beat” – smile, breathe, let people follow you
Tips learned by teaching with Jupyter
For the JVM people: stop thinking only about IDEs, Ivy, Maven, etc. (ibid, Knuth1984)
BUILD UBER JARS, LOAD LIBS FROM CONTAINER, NOT THE NETWORK!
(apologies for shouting)

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Jupyter notebooks + Git repos provide a low-cost,
pragmatic way toward the practice of repeatable
science – in this case, repeatable Data Science
• executable documents
• code + params + results + descriptions
• shareable insights
Notebooks: a cure for silos

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In data science, we see the benefits to teams for shared
insights, storytelling, etc.
Meanwhile domain expertise is generally more important than
knowledge about tools
There’s a value for developers to use notebooks in lieu of IDEs
in some cases – what are those cases?
GitHub now renders notebooks, so they can be used for
documentation, reporting, etc.
Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) can be assigned through
Zenodo, making notebooks citable for academic publication
“Sharing is caring”

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Authoring & Scale-Out

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Launchbot.io

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Launchbot allows a notebook author to build a
container that includes the required Jupyter kernel,
installed libraries, datasets, etc.
You need to have Docker installed on your laptop
The backend uses Git and DockerHub to manage
containers
For scale, deploy to DC/OS
Achieving scale

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presenter:
Just Enough Math
O’Reilly (2014)
justenoughmath.com
monthly newsletter for updates,
events, conf summaries, etc.:
liber118.com/pxn/
@pacoid