Brian Granger and Fernando Perez of the IPython Project

You can find past episodes and other information about the show at podcastinit.com

Brief Introduction

• Date of recording – June 3rd, 2015
• Hosts – Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
• Overview – Interview with Fernando Perez and Brian Granger, core developers of IPython/Project Jupyter
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Interview with Brian Granger and Fernando Perez

• Introductions
• How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris
• For anyone who may not have heard of or used IPython, can you describe what it is?
• How challenging was it to port IPython to Python 3?
  • Thomas Kluyver



• What prompted the name change from IPython to Project Jupyter and were there any associated changes in the project itself?
  • Name inspired by Julia, Python and R – the three programming languages of data science



• Data scientists have adopted the use of IPython notebooks in their work on a large scale, what is it about notebooks that lend themselves to this particular problem domain?
  • Bayesian methods for Hackers – Cameron Davidson-Pilon
  • Signal processing in Python
  • O’Reilly added support for notebooks into Atlas publishing platform



• IPython Notebook seems like an incredible tool for educators is advanced fields. Have you seen wide spread adoption in this area and is it a focus for the project?
  • NBGrader – notebook grader



• Github recently added the ability to render notebooks in a repo. Did you work with them to build that integration?


• What are some of the most interesting uses of IPython notebooks that you have seen?
  • Gallery of interesting notebooks on the wiki
    • Reproducible academic publications
    • Couple of dozen scientific papers, some very high profile

  
  
  • Educational notebooks on various subjects
  
  
  • Great learning resource, as well as entertaining
  
  
  • MOOC taught between distributed team on Open EdX using IPython notebooks about numerical computing with Python
  
  
  • Peter Norvig collection of IPython notebooks
    • Includes analysis of traveling salesman problem

  
  
  • notebooks.codeneuro.org– time series data analysis <- Couldn’t get this to work. -Chris
  
  
  
  


• Are there any notable projects that use IPython as one of their components?
  • KBase for computational biology
  • Sage – Open source mathematics project written in Python
    • Created by number theorist William Stein
    • Custom parser to allow for non-python syntax

  
  
  • Quantopian – Collaborative platform for financial modeling. Runs on top of IPython
  
  
  • Wakari from Continuum Analytics – hosted IPython with computing environment
  
  
  • Rackspace hosts TempNB and other IPython services
  
  
  
  


• Where do you see Project Jupyter going in the future? Are there any particular new features you’d like to see added? – Tobias
  • One of the biggest targeted features is real-time collaboration
    • Prototyped by engineers from Google

  
  
  • More modular UI and architecture
  
  
  • Multi-user deployments with Jupyter Hub
  
  
  
  


• A few weeks ago we interviewed Jonathan Slenders who wrote ptpython, which brings IDE like capabilities to interactive Python. Have you ever considered including this in IPython?


• What are some of the features that an average user might not know about?


• Is there anything in particular that you would like to ask our listeners for help with?
  • Pitch in with the development effort
  • Organize community events on behalf of IPython/Jupyter
  • Be patient while documentation improves

Picks

• Tobias
  • Dayworld trilogy by Phillip Jose Farmer
  • ReadRuler.com



• Chris
  • RubyTapas by Avdi Grimm
  • CodeNewbies
  • Tweetbot



• Brian Granger
  • Data Science from Scratch – Joel Gruß
  • Elements of Graphing Data – William Cleveland



• Fernando Perez
  • Republic Lost – Lawrence Lessig
  • Alvaro Mutis

Keep in Touch

• Twitter @projectjupyter, @ipythondev, @ellisonbg, @fperez_org

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango
Orchestra
/ CC BY-SA