Jupyter Community Call 2/28#

Date: February 28, 2023, at 8am Pacific (your timezone)

Discourse: Youtube

Please note:

Purpose#

Think of it as a monthly, virtual JupyterCon. It’s a place to announce and share fun things happening in the Jupyter community.

For more discussion on the format of these calls, see the thread here.

Short reports, celebrations, shout-outs#

This is a place to make short announcements (without a need for discussion).

  • Isabela Many thanks to the Security project team for being flexible and helping community call have this time on the calendar!

    • Security calls are now 1st and 3rd Tuesday of every month

    • Community call is last Tuesday

    • No collisions anymore, can move community call to more friendly time! :)

  • Isabela Governance update: Software Steering Council is in the process of getting office hours on the calendar and resuming all other duties.

Agenda Items#

  • @rowanc1 @agoose77 - jupyterlab-myst overview and demo https://github.com/executablebooks/jupyterlab-myst

    • MyST: Markup language incubated in executable books project, spun out last week

      • 10% of Python documentation is written MyST and increasing

    • Moving toward Javascript world => better integration with JupyterLab

    • See myst-tools.org, new website for the project

    • MyST: Support for scientific documents and publications, export to various high-quality PDF formats

      • Also rendered static versions of Jupyter notebooks

      • What metadata and front-matter needs to be added

      • How to bring computational thinkin into publishing

    • JupyterLab MyST extension

      • Rich metadata as data at the top of document (YAML)

        • Executing the metadata cells yields a nice top block for a notebook

        • Nicer than custom HTML, parseable, better to edit and view

      • Callout blocks:

        • Bracketed directives like «:::{important}»

        • Also class information like dropdown

      • Cross-references

      • Inline execution in markdown cells

        • Syntax subject to change

        • Roles and directives e.g.

          {eval}`1+1`
        
        • Embed Jupyter widgets directly in markdown, figures, sparklines

        • Better weaving of documentation and code

    • Ongoing nbformat workshop and MyST

      • Discussing the challenges of developing the extension

      • In particular, embedding computation in documentation, wasn’t originally envisioned

      • Input types may need to expand

    • Static publishing, see also https://thebe.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

      • Write documents with interactivity

      • Publishing mechanisms

      • Help promote interactivity and computation experience to the end sharing of documents

    • Mixing HTML and MyST and accessibility?

      • Keeping these issues in mind during development

      • Gets more difficult with widgets

      • Efforts to use the same technology pieces as Jupyter

      • => as Jupyter improves things upstream in widgets space it propagates here

      • Archivability, semantic HTML, paying attention to accessibility scores

        • https://myst-tools.org/docs/mystjs/accessibility-and-performance

  • Ongoing nbformat workshop discussion @isabela-pf

    • We don’t have a type of Markdown we specify in notebooks

    • This has created some difficulty during user testing

    • Would be nice to at least know what kind of Markdown specification we’re following

    • There are web accessibility guidelines, not clear always how they correlate

    • Greater clarity would help because accommodations get hooked in at the HTML level

    • At the workshop @rowanc1:

      • Split into 3 groups

        • Text-based format in addition to standard format (e.g. jupytext)

        • Cell types workflow

        • Markdown formats inside cells

      • The wild west of notebook, cell metadata, how do people use it?

        • Noteable example

          • Front-end interfaces that don’t go through Jupyter/JupyterLab

          • Visualization state stored in cell metadata

          • Namespaced in noteable

        • Are there changes in terms of cell metadata being considered PR/discourse wise?

        • Simplest use case (kinda) marking cell metadata for special treatment or processing

Attendees#

Name

Institution

GitHub Handle

Rollin

NERSC

@rcthomas

Rowan

Curvenote / ExecutableBooks

@rowanc1

Gabriela Vives

QuantStack

GabrielaVives

Wayne Decatur

Upstate Medical Univ.

@fomightez

Isabela Presedo-Floyd

Quansight Labs

@isabela-pf

Plus 1 more.