Tutorials: Going beyond with Jupyter Notebooks: Write your first package using literate programming

Wednesday - April 19th, 2023 9 a.m.-12:30 p.m. in 251AB

Presented by:


Experience Level:

Some experience

Description

Literate programming is a programming paradigm that incorporates explanations in natural language (such as Spanish) embedded with the traditional code. Literate programming allows developers to tell a story with their codes, improving the understanding of the project, focusing on documentation, and making it easier to onboard developers. Although being a very well-regarded concept discussed by respected researchers like Donald Knuth, literate programming tools like Jupyter notebooks are considered inefficient for serious software development. This perception has limited Jupyter notebooks to simple python scripts and educational materials.

The Nbdev library has proven that literate programming is useful in developing big and serious projects, like FastAi. This tutorial will show attendees how to get the benefits of literate programming while also following software development best practices. We'll get hands-on experience in writing and publishing a Python Package while using Jupyter Notebooks. In addition to publishing the package, we'll also learn how to deploy the docs, run simple tests and run these tests on CI/CD, making sure that our package will only get published if the tests pass.

Even though this tutorial uses Jupyter Notebooks and Nbdev the student doesn't need previous knowledge of these tools. A simple computer with Python and pip installed is all we'll use. Students should have some minimal Python knowledge and Git experience (Simple commands like push, pull, add and commit). A GitHub account will also be necessary.