Category: Version Control

Introducing ReviewNB: Visual Diff for Jupyter Notebooks

I’m excited to announce ReviewNB,  a tool that helps you version control & code review Jupyter Notebooks.

Problem

Jupyter is great for data exploration but it’s hard to go beyond that & do any kind of collaborative work with it. Following challenges exist in using Jupyter Notebooks with modern version control system like Git,

  • Notebook diffs are hard to read. Hence we can’t do code reviews on GitHub
  • Merging in remote changes is hard due to JSON format of Notebook files (.ipynb)
  • No easy way to share feedback & have discussion around Notebooks
  • It’s not easy to reproduce Notebook results
  • It’s not easy to test notebook code cells

Continue reading “Introducing ReviewNB: Visual Diff for Jupyter Notebooks” →

Challenges with Jupyter Notebook

UPDATE: I built a tool to solve some of the challenges mentioned in the post. It’s now live at https://www.reviewnb.com/

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A lot of people, including me, love Jupyter Notebooks. It’s a fantastic tool for data science. Today I’m not going to talk about it’s amazing capabilities but rather how it fails at two important things: Version Control and Reproducibility. I will also outline the current state-of-the-art to solve these problems. It’s a useful read if you are a Jupyter user. Let’s jump right in.

Continue reading “Challenges with Jupyter Notebook” →