If you are not familiar with ReviewNB, you might want to check that out first. It’s a tool that lets your team review Jupyter Notebook changes & enables collaborative workflows with it.
Today, I’m excited to announce commenting feature for all the ReviewNB users. Here’s everything you can do with it,
Write comments next to code/markdown cell
You can select any Notebook cell and write a comment for it. It could be a clarifying question, suggestion or just a simple comment.
Reply to a conversation thread
Author and anyone else on the team can chime into the conversation. With Notebook cell context at hand it’s super easy to see what the conversation is about & participate if needed.
Resolve/UnResolve conversations
As you can see in the last screenshot, each thread has a button to resolve a conversation. All resolved conversations are minimized by default. It lets the team focus only on active conversations.
Write overall comments
Team members can write overall comments about the change without tying it to a specific notebook cell. It’s useful for clarifying high level concerns that relate to the entire change.
Conclusion
Here are some details to keep in mind as an end user,
- All the comments are posted to GitHub and nothing is stored in ReviewNB itself.
- GitHub only allows writing comments on changed parts of the file. But with ReviewNB, you can write comment for any Notebook cell (irrespective of whether it’s changed or not).
- You can reply to existing threads via GitHub interface as well but starting new conversation threads must happen from the ReviewNB UI. This is to overcome GitHub’s limitation mentioned above.
That’s all. My aim is to make Notebooks a first class entity in Data science & machine learning teams. Enabling standard engineering practices for Notebooks is a big step in that direction. If I can help in any way, get in touch at hello@amirathi.com
Amit Rathi 