WEBVTT 00:00:00.001 --> 00:00:04.620 Have you come across a GitHub repo with a Jupyter notebook that has a run in Binder button? 00:00:04.620 --> 00:00:09.720 It seems magical. How does it know what dependencies and external libraries you might need? 00:00:09.720 --> 00:00:15.180 And where does it run anyway? Like all technology, it's not magic. It's the result of hard work by 00:00:15.180 --> 00:00:20.460 people behind the project. In this case, mybinder.org. On this episode, you'll meet Tim Head, 00:00:20.460 --> 00:00:24.640 who has been working to bring Binder to us all. Take a look inside mybinder.org, 00:00:24.640 --> 00:00:30.580 how it works, and the history of the project. This is Talk Python To Me, episode 256, recorded 00:00:30.580 --> 00:00:50.280 February 20th, 2020. Welcome to Talk Python To Me, a weekly podcast on Python, the language, 00:00:50.280 --> 00:00:54.460 the libraries, the ecosystem, and the personalities. This is your host, Michael Kennedy, 00:00:54.920 --> 00:00:59.220 follow me on Twitter where I'm @mkennedy, keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at 00:00:59.220 --> 00:01:04.840 talkpython.fm, and follow the show on Twitter via at Talk Python. This episode is brought to you by 00:01:04.840 --> 00:01:10.080 Linode and Talk Python Training. Be sure to check out what the offers are for both of these segments. 00:01:10.080 --> 00:01:14.460 It really helps support the show. Tim, welcome to Talk Python To Me. 00:01:14.460 --> 00:01:15.020 Hi, Mike. 00:01:15.020 --> 00:01:18.940 It's great to have you on the show, and I'm really looking forward to learning more about Binder. 00:01:18.940 --> 00:01:25.500 It's fantastic to be on the show and to talk to you about Binder, what we do, how it came to be, 00:01:25.500 --> 00:01:29.420 and hopefully how it will continue forever in the future. 00:01:29.420 --> 00:01:37.280 I hope so. It's definitely going to continue in some sense, no matter what, where GitHub is taking 00:01:37.280 --> 00:01:44.600 all of the public repositories and encoding them on tape and putting them in some vault in some Nordic country. 00:01:44.600 --> 00:01:50.560 I can't remember exactly where, but it's probably already been archived there for the world. 00:01:50.560 --> 00:01:54.680 So it's definitely going to continue, but I hope it continues actively as well. 00:01:54.680 --> 00:02:02.920 Yeah, that sounds good. We have a contributor who lives in Norway, so maybe we should try and organize 00:02:02.920 --> 00:02:05.800 a trip to wherever this vault is. 00:02:05.800 --> 00:02:10.900 Yes, exactly. I can't remember where it is, which country it's in, but yeah, it's up there. 00:02:10.900 --> 00:02:12.380 It's got to be near Norway. Pretty cool. 00:02:12.380 --> 00:02:17.660 All right, now, I'm definitely looking forward to talking about Binder and learning more and a lot 00:02:17.660 --> 00:02:21.700 of the behind-the-scenes stuff. But before we get to all that, let's just start with your story. 00:02:21.700 --> 00:02:23.200 How did you get into programming and Python? 00:02:23.200 --> 00:02:31.580 So when I was a teenager, I wanted to do what everybody 20 years ago wanted to do, is build websites. 00:02:31.580 --> 00:02:38.180 And at the time, my dad told me, oh yeah, maybe you should check out Python. 00:02:38.180 --> 00:02:42.400 And then they had this fantastic web server called Zope. 00:02:42.400 --> 00:02:50.620 And then I learned how to use that and make forum software and other little websites like that. 00:02:50.620 --> 00:02:52.060 And that's how I got into Python. 00:02:52.060 --> 00:02:58.140 And if you wanted to be mean, never really learn any other programming languages. 00:02:58.140 --> 00:03:00.240 If you don't have to. 00:03:00.240 --> 00:03:03.460 I think there's value in other programming languages. 00:03:04.080 --> 00:03:09.260 But people who know Python are in a bit of a special place because it's so widely used 00:03:09.260 --> 00:03:12.440 and accepted, you're not forced to go learn something else necessarily. 00:03:12.440 --> 00:03:16.280 Other than JavaScript, everybody's forced to learn JavaScript if you want to do anything on 00:03:16.280 --> 00:03:16.560 the web. 00:03:16.560 --> 00:03:17.360 Yeah, that's right. 00:03:17.360 --> 00:03:19.100 So I know a little bit of JavaScript. 00:03:19.100 --> 00:03:29.420 And I was a physics student at university and then worked at CERN as well as a physicist. 00:03:29.420 --> 00:03:31.880 And there we write a lot of C++. 00:03:31.880 --> 00:03:36.620 So staring at assembler code is the other thing I do. 00:03:36.620 --> 00:03:36.840 Yeah. 00:03:36.840 --> 00:03:39.040 So are you still working at CERN? 00:03:39.040 --> 00:03:42.260 So no, I'm not an academic anymore. 00:03:42.260 --> 00:03:45.200 You've hung up your tweed jacket and your pipe? 00:03:45.200 --> 00:03:46.140 Yeah. 00:03:46.140 --> 00:03:46.520 Yeah. 00:03:46.520 --> 00:03:50.480 Actually, I'm not sure if you get those before you become a professor. 00:03:50.480 --> 00:03:55.380 Maybe only when you get a tenure, maybe full professor, you get the hat at the end. 00:03:55.380 --> 00:03:55.580 Yeah. 00:03:55.580 --> 00:03:56.020 Yeah. 00:03:56.020 --> 00:03:57.200 Yeah. 00:03:57.200 --> 00:04:04.720 So I think three or four years ago, I left academia and thought there was no better thing 00:04:04.720 --> 00:04:09.120 to do in your life than be unemployed and moved to Switzerland on the same day. 00:04:09.120 --> 00:04:16.180 And I started my own business, started my own small consulting company around data science, 00:04:16.180 --> 00:04:18.400 machine learning, that kind of stuff. 00:04:18.820 --> 00:04:24.580 And today I work for a small company in Zurich that is called Scribble. 00:04:24.580 --> 00:04:30.380 So like you scribble on a piece of paper and we do electronic signatures. 00:04:30.380 --> 00:04:37.900 So if you need to sign documents which require legal signatures, you should come to us. 00:04:37.900 --> 00:04:38.200 Okay. 00:04:38.200 --> 00:04:38.720 Yeah. 00:04:38.720 --> 00:04:39.060 Yeah. 00:04:39.060 --> 00:04:39.560 Super cool. 00:04:39.560 --> 00:04:41.240 What was it like working at CERN? 00:04:41.460 --> 00:04:44.580 Oh, it was one of the best places I've worked in my life. 00:04:44.580 --> 00:04:48.820 There's a reason the competition to work there is so crazy. 00:04:48.820 --> 00:04:49.840 Yeah. 00:04:49.840 --> 00:04:50.360 It's fantastic. 00:04:50.360 --> 00:04:56.140 It seems like a really amazing place and it's one of the true cutting edge places where science 00:04:56.140 --> 00:04:57.680 is happening these days. 00:04:57.680 --> 00:05:02.380 And they also didn't set the atmosphere on fire or create a black hole or anything like 00:05:02.380 --> 00:05:02.560 that. 00:05:02.560 --> 00:05:03.240 So it was all good. 00:05:03.240 --> 00:05:03.680 Yeah. 00:05:04.020 --> 00:05:08.220 It's a great place to work and I really, really enjoyed it. 00:05:08.220 --> 00:05:12.780 But at some point decided it wasn't what I wanted to keep doing. 00:05:12.780 --> 00:05:13.600 Sure. 00:05:13.600 --> 00:05:16.140 And so I switched to do something else. 00:05:16.140 --> 00:05:16.560 Yeah. 00:05:16.560 --> 00:05:19.120 You know, I said I was in academics for a while. 00:05:19.120 --> 00:05:22.640 I'm working in math and I really loved it. 00:05:22.640 --> 00:05:26.740 But in the end, I felt like I could just have more impact and just do more interesting, 00:05:26.740 --> 00:05:31.680 concrete stuff with programming than I could with, you know, just math ideas. 00:05:31.680 --> 00:05:32.000 Yeah. 00:05:32.000 --> 00:05:32.700 Yeah. 00:05:32.700 --> 00:05:33.160 I've been there. 00:05:33.160 --> 00:05:33.760 I've been there with you. 00:05:33.760 --> 00:05:40.280 Now, let's start this conversation at the high level before we dive down into Binder, 00:05:40.280 --> 00:05:45.580 which is a tool we're working with and hosting notebooks in a special way. 00:05:45.580 --> 00:05:47.880 Hopefully I got that roughly right. 00:05:47.880 --> 00:05:48.920 Yeah. 00:05:48.920 --> 00:05:49.180 Yeah. 00:05:49.180 --> 00:05:50.180 That's about right. 00:05:50.180 --> 00:05:50.460 Cool. 00:05:50.460 --> 00:05:52.280 But let's start at a high level. 00:05:52.280 --> 00:05:54.600 Just like, what's the state of notebooks today? 00:05:54.600 --> 00:05:56.760 Now, just a little background on me. 00:05:56.760 --> 00:06:03.560 If you don't know, I do more on the website, database side, random utility side. 00:06:03.560 --> 00:06:05.880 Not as much data science. 00:06:05.880 --> 00:06:06.200 Right. 00:06:06.200 --> 00:06:08.420 Although I do pay attention to whatnot. 00:06:08.420 --> 00:06:10.580 It's not where I live day to day. 00:06:10.780 --> 00:06:14.820 So I'm genuinely asking, like, what's the state of notebooks today, do you think? 00:06:14.820 --> 00:06:18.680 I think it is more exciting than it's ever been. 00:06:18.680 --> 00:06:23.040 When notebooks started and, you know, you can discuss on who invented them. 00:06:23.040 --> 00:06:32.700 But for a long time, it was a tool for describing what you were doing to a human and to the computer simultaneously. 00:06:32.700 --> 00:06:39.220 Because you have the narrative text for humans and the computer text code for the computer. 00:06:40.220 --> 00:06:45.340 And now people are, like, going crazy, you know? 00:06:45.340 --> 00:06:50.240 People are trying to automatically turn notebooks into web applications. 00:06:50.240 --> 00:07:00.760 People are wanting to run, like, only small parts of their notebook and make it look like it's within a normal editor. 00:07:00.760 --> 00:07:03.880 And it's like a text file kind of thing. 00:07:03.980 --> 00:07:06.020 How can we make a notebook, which... 00:07:06.020 --> 00:07:06.480 Right, right. 00:07:06.480 --> 00:07:11.000 Both, like, PyCharm and VS Code have that kind of flavor, right? 00:07:11.000 --> 00:07:13.460 There's, like, a special comment that separates the cells. 00:07:13.460 --> 00:07:16.520 But you're kind of in a text file, in one of their views, at least. 00:07:16.740 --> 00:07:17.460 Exactly, yeah. 00:07:17.460 --> 00:07:20.840 And I don't use it very much, so I'm not sure. 00:07:20.840 --> 00:07:26.880 But I think you can then just highlight lines and say, run these lines in my file. 00:07:26.880 --> 00:07:27.860 Right. 00:07:27.860 --> 00:07:29.600 Which, I mean, yeah. 00:07:29.600 --> 00:07:33.540 You can imagine doing all sorts of completely crazy stuff that way. 00:07:33.540 --> 00:07:34.480 Yeah, it's pretty exciting. 00:07:34.480 --> 00:07:38.940 And there's a lot of online hosted places as well, right? 00:07:38.940 --> 00:07:43.100 Google and Azure both have ways in which you can log into your notebooks. 00:07:43.100 --> 00:07:44.680 And it may cost some money. 00:07:44.680 --> 00:07:45.380 They may be free. 00:07:45.380 --> 00:07:46.360 It depends, right? 00:07:46.620 --> 00:07:46.860 Yeah. 00:07:46.860 --> 00:07:52.340 So there's Google CoLab, Azure Notebooks. 00:07:52.340 --> 00:07:56.740 Various startups offer it as a service. 00:07:56.740 --> 00:08:01.980 There's a service called CoCalc that offers hosted notebooks. 00:08:01.980 --> 00:08:05.200 So there's a lot of people out there who do it. 00:08:05.200 --> 00:08:08.080 And mybinder.org is one of them. 00:08:08.080 --> 00:08:08.400 Okay. 00:08:08.400 --> 00:08:14.060 I guess it's probably a good time to talk about Binder and, like, where does it fit in this world? 00:08:14.360 --> 00:08:19.720 So Binder, what we offer people is that you send a link to somebody else. 00:08:20.380 --> 00:08:21.100 And they click on it. 00:08:21.100 --> 00:08:21.720 And they click on it. 00:08:21.720 --> 00:08:28.760 And if you did everything right, they can just run whatever code you wanted them to run. 00:08:29.100 --> 00:08:31.320 For example, you wanted them to try out. 00:08:31.320 --> 00:08:32.900 It should just work. 00:08:32.900 --> 00:08:34.160 And it runs in their browser. 00:08:34.160 --> 00:08:37.000 So they can do it from their tablet, from their phone. 00:08:37.000 --> 00:08:40.560 If they want to use a laptop, they can use a laptop as well. 00:08:40.560 --> 00:08:42.300 But they don't have to install anything. 00:08:42.300 --> 00:08:43.840 Do anything like this. 00:08:44.040 --> 00:08:49.420 And in that sense, it's just another notebook hosting service. 00:08:49.420 --> 00:08:54.000 The twist is that you cannot create an account. 00:08:54.000 --> 00:08:57.340 There is no way for you to make an account with us. 00:08:57.340 --> 00:08:57.980 Okay. 00:08:57.980 --> 00:09:05.680 And that means you can just send the link to everybody and it will just start, which I think is fantastic. 00:09:05.680 --> 00:09:17.180 So people use it a lot, for example, for workshops, because everybody knows that a tutorial or workshop they went to where they spent the first half of the workshop trying to get everybody set up. 00:09:17.180 --> 00:09:17.440 Right. 00:09:17.600 --> 00:09:23.400 And with a service like mybinder.org, you can send them all the link. 00:09:23.400 --> 00:09:31.000 And if the class is not ginormous, they follow the link and then they have something that they can use for the workshop. 00:09:31.000 --> 00:09:35.720 Then you can spend maybe the end of the workshop teaching them how to set it up locally. 00:09:35.720 --> 00:09:37.140 But you can get going. 00:09:37.140 --> 00:09:40.700 And binder is something that you could set up locally? 00:09:40.700 --> 00:09:46.720 Or maybe they would focus more just on here's how you set up this particular project with these notebooks and these requirements. 00:09:46.720 --> 00:09:48.320 I guess either, huh? 00:09:48.320 --> 00:09:49.820 But more likely the latter. 00:09:49.820 --> 00:09:52.300 The answer is it depends what you want to do. 00:09:52.300 --> 00:09:57.660 Imagine, like, how would I set up something that I can use for my course? 00:09:57.660 --> 00:10:03.820 I would create a GitHub repository and I would put, for example, a requirements.txt in it. 00:10:03.820 --> 00:10:10.640 And as human instructions, I would write, please run pip install minus r requirements.txt. 00:10:12.140 --> 00:10:23.480 And this is such a common pattern that for mybinder.org, we built a tool that goes looking for these files and says, aha, I found a requirements.txt. 00:10:23.480 --> 00:10:29.260 I bet you the author of this repo wanted us to run pip install minus r requirements.txt. 00:10:30.260 --> 00:10:35.640 And in an overwhelming number of cases, that is what the author wanted us to do. 00:10:35.640 --> 00:10:37.480 So that's what we automate. 00:10:37.480 --> 00:10:44.560 And so the end goal is that we didn't invent any new way of setting up your software. 00:10:44.560 --> 00:10:50.280 We tried to just spot the patterns of what lots of people are already doing. 00:10:50.480 --> 00:10:52.100 That makes it easy to automate. 00:10:52.100 --> 00:10:57.820 But it means also it should be fairly straightforward to then do it locally. 00:10:57.820 --> 00:10:58.280 Right. 00:10:58.280 --> 00:11:03.620 Because as long as you follow the same basic patterns as was intended anyway, then you're good. 00:11:03.620 --> 00:11:07.840 But you get to avoid all of the challenge of, oh, wait, I don't have Python. 00:11:07.840 --> 00:11:15.040 Or when I type Python, it says that print has these weird semicolon or these parentheses or, you know, some weird thing. 00:11:15.040 --> 00:11:20.120 It's like print is not a function or I don't know, whatever it's going to say, because they have Python too. 00:11:20.120 --> 00:11:27.540 And they didn't know that when they type Python, they got the wrong Python, but they don't have permission to install the right Python. 00:11:27.540 --> 00:11:31.660 And there's just like, yeah, there's just layers of these challenges. 00:11:31.660 --> 00:11:36.420 And the problem is often like that's the first thing to hit people. 00:11:36.420 --> 00:11:36.680 Right. 00:11:36.680 --> 00:11:40.720 Like in a couple of weeks, they're probably fine to be addressing these issues ago. 00:11:40.720 --> 00:11:42.220 Yeah, I understand what's happening. 00:11:42.220 --> 00:11:43.020 I'm going to fix this. 00:11:43.100 --> 00:11:45.220 But that's not what you want to be. 00:11:45.220 --> 00:11:46.500 Welcome to Python. 00:11:46.500 --> 00:11:49.820 Here's your four problems to struggle through and set up. 00:11:49.820 --> 00:11:50.020 Right. 00:11:50.020 --> 00:11:50.580 Exactly. 00:11:50.580 --> 00:11:56.560 And it takes an infinite or seemingly infinite amount of time to debug all these problems. 00:11:56.560 --> 00:12:02.680 If you have a group of 30 people, I guarantee there is going to be people there who have a problem you've never seen before. 00:12:02.680 --> 00:12:09.180 And now as the person trying to run the course, you're like, oh, my God, we're going to do some life debugging. 00:12:09.180 --> 00:12:11.080 That's not what I wanted to show. 00:12:11.080 --> 00:12:12.020 Yeah, exactly. 00:12:12.240 --> 00:12:15.700 It's the way that a lot of training sessions begin or a lot of workshops begin. 00:12:15.700 --> 00:12:19.540 It's definitely not a good impression for the students. 00:12:19.540 --> 00:12:21.180 And it's certainly not productive time. 00:12:21.180 --> 00:12:23.020 So this is really nice. 00:12:23.020 --> 00:12:23.260 Right. 00:12:23.260 --> 00:12:24.660 So you can set this up. 00:12:24.660 --> 00:12:29.160 Typically, I don't know, all the workshops and trainings I did all had GitHub repos. 00:12:29.160 --> 00:12:32.180 And it's like, hey, here's your GitHub repo for the stuff we're giving you. 00:12:32.180 --> 00:12:33.020 Here's the repo. 00:12:33.640 --> 00:12:36.860 Here's the part of the repo where it has the code that you're given. 00:12:36.860 --> 00:12:39.020 Here's the code where I'm going to write and I'll put it in there later. 00:12:39.020 --> 00:12:40.360 Get started. 00:12:40.360 --> 00:12:42.180 And that's a perfect fit for Binder, right? 00:12:42.180 --> 00:12:42.700 Exactly. 00:12:42.700 --> 00:12:43.040 Yeah. 00:12:43.160 --> 00:12:52.580 And we started a lot of people who work on Binder come from the Project Jupyter ecosystem. 00:12:53.100 --> 00:12:55.520 So there's a strong focus on notebooks. 00:12:55.520 --> 00:13:04.680 But now there are examples where you've replaced the UI of notebooks with VS Code because VS Code is also just a web app. 00:13:04.680 --> 00:13:07.480 Actually, you can start if you wanted to. 00:13:07.620 --> 00:13:15.380 You could start a repo, which to the users, presenters of it, it's just VS Code in the cloud somewhere. 00:13:15.380 --> 00:13:16.200 Oh, no kidding. 00:13:16.200 --> 00:13:18.280 Now, I knew VS Code did that. 00:13:18.280 --> 00:13:23.120 I knew that that's something they announced under the term Visual Studio Online. 00:13:23.120 --> 00:13:27.740 And also Coder.com was doing that as well. 00:13:27.740 --> 00:13:30.080 But how do you guys do that? 00:13:30.080 --> 00:13:36.500 Like, I guess VS Code will let you set that up for your own environment, not just for theirs. 00:13:36.500 --> 00:13:37.200 Is that how it works? 00:13:37.380 --> 00:13:44.340 So we actually take advantage of the very hard work Coder.com, I think. 00:13:44.340 --> 00:13:53.300 I'll give them a shout out because I think they're the people who did all the work for the VS Code port or modifications. 00:13:53.300 --> 00:13:54.700 I'm not sure what you call it. 00:13:54.700 --> 00:13:58.080 It does run as a web app. 00:13:58.080 --> 00:13:58.740 Right, right. 00:13:58.740 --> 00:14:04.080 Coder.com is definitely the first experience that I've seen where that was happening. 00:14:04.080 --> 00:14:04.500 Yeah. 00:14:04.500 --> 00:14:04.800 Yeah. 00:14:05.000 --> 00:14:08.420 And they publish their hard work as open source. 00:14:08.420 --> 00:14:15.560 So we allow people to install that or trigger that being installed in their binder. 00:14:16.240 --> 00:14:21.200 And then you can use it as an alternative UI. 00:14:21.200 --> 00:14:29.140 So that was one of the things that I was thinking of here as we were exploring some of the use cases and how this is interesting and useful. 00:14:29.140 --> 00:14:29.420 Right. 00:14:29.460 --> 00:14:38.420 So it makes a lot of sense that this is a lot of sense. 00:14:38.420 --> 00:14:41.740 So it's just a matter of where the server executes its kernel and whatnot. 00:14:41.740 --> 00:14:42.080 Right. 00:14:42.600 --> 00:14:45.160 So that's pretty easy to do, relatively speaking. 00:14:45.160 --> 00:14:49.660 But if it's pure Python code, it's a different kind of challenge, right? 00:14:49.660 --> 00:14:51.500 Because then how do you edit those files? 00:14:51.500 --> 00:14:52.640 How do you interact with them? 00:14:52.640 --> 00:14:54.360 How do you get a terminal into the environment? 00:14:54.360 --> 00:14:57.640 It's a lot more multi-step, it felt like. 00:14:57.740 --> 00:14:58.300 Yeah. 00:14:58.300 --> 00:15:03.680 If you could fire up like a Visual Studio Code in the cloud instance, right? 00:15:03.680 --> 00:15:05.020 That it's got the little terminal. 00:15:05.020 --> 00:15:09.000 That terminal runs inside the container that's hosting it and so on. 00:15:09.080 --> 00:15:10.180 I think that's pretty awesome. 00:15:10.180 --> 00:15:13.880 That really expands the appeal of Binder, I think. 00:15:13.880 --> 00:15:14.260 Yeah. 00:15:14.260 --> 00:15:14.700 Yeah. 00:15:14.700 --> 00:15:25.860 And you get a lot of the language server extension, the full, like, what is it? 00:15:25.860 --> 00:15:26.720 Hints. 00:15:26.720 --> 00:15:29.820 How to complete the function, what the arguments are. 00:15:29.820 --> 00:15:31.500 All this stuff. 00:15:31.500 --> 00:15:38.880 If you know how to install the plugins or enable the plugins you need, then you get all that good stuff. 00:15:38.880 --> 00:15:43.980 This portion of Talk Python To Me is brought to you by Linode. 00:15:43.980 --> 00:15:48.080 Whether you're working on a personal project or managing your enterprise's infrastructure, 00:15:48.080 --> 00:15:52.920 Linode has the pricing, support, and scale that you need to take your project to the next level. 00:15:52.920 --> 00:15:57.720 With 11 data centers worldwide, including their newest data center in Sydney, Australia, 00:15:57.720 --> 00:16:03.420 enterprise-grade hardware, S3-compatible storage, and the next-generation network, 00:16:03.420 --> 00:16:07.580 Linode delivers the performance that you expect at a price that you don't. 00:16:08.000 --> 00:16:13.000 Get started on Linode today with a $20 credit, and you get access to native SSD storage, 00:16:13.000 --> 00:16:19.140 a 40-gigabit network, industry-leading processors, their revamped cloud manager at cloud.linode.com, 00:16:19.140 --> 00:16:23.640 root access to your server, along with their newest API, and a Python CLI. 00:16:23.640 --> 00:16:28.880 Just visit talkpython.fm/Linode when creating a new Linode account, 00:16:28.880 --> 00:16:31.660 and you'll automatically get $20 credit for your next project. 00:16:31.660 --> 00:16:32.940 Oh, and one last thing. 00:16:32.940 --> 00:16:33.720 They're hiring. 00:16:33.940 --> 00:16:36.820 Go to linode.com slash careers to find out more. 00:16:36.820 --> 00:16:38.140 Let them know that we sent you. 00:16:38.940 --> 00:16:44.060 Do you set that up as part of, as a project owner? 00:16:44.060 --> 00:16:49.440 When you create your binder setup, can you say, this is going to be a Python plus JavaScript thing, 00:16:49.440 --> 00:16:52.500 so we're going to have to make sure those extensions come along for the ride? 00:16:52.500 --> 00:16:52.900 Yeah. 00:16:52.900 --> 00:16:53.020 Yeah. 00:16:53.020 --> 00:16:59.960 So you, as the owner of the GitHub repo, you specify that you would also like to have, 00:16:59.960 --> 00:17:03.400 I think it's called code server, the executable. 00:17:03.400 --> 00:17:06.060 You would like to have that installed as well. 00:17:06.460 --> 00:17:13.240 And then you format the link you share with people slightly differently so that we know to send you to this other UI. 00:17:13.240 --> 00:17:19.560 And then, yeah, you need to also, if you know which plugins and so on to install, 00:17:19.560 --> 00:17:28.740 then during the building phase of your binder, you have to add a few lines that we can execute to do all that stuff. 00:17:28.980 --> 00:17:32.580 Sure. Okay. Well, that sounds very flexible and so on. 00:17:32.580 --> 00:17:39.040 I want to talk about getting the launch binder, launch this in binder on your GitHub and all the details of how you do this. 00:17:39.040 --> 00:17:42.380 But really, just since we're still kind of beginning, let me just ask you real quick, 00:17:42.380 --> 00:17:44.680 how did you get started with binder in this whole project anyway? 00:17:44.680 --> 00:17:52.740 That's a good link back to my previous life at CERN, where as a student and as a postdoc also, 00:17:53.760 --> 00:17:58.880 we write so much software to analyze our data and it does fairly complicated stuff. 00:17:58.880 --> 00:18:05.820 And so when you see somebody else doing something cool, you're like, oh, I wish I could do that as well. 00:18:05.820 --> 00:18:12.140 But if you ask anybody in particle physics or at CERN to share their code, 00:18:12.140 --> 00:18:18.820 and then it only takes you, let's say, a week to get it running, doing what they were doing. 00:18:18.820 --> 00:18:22.580 You get this thing, you compile that from source, and then you do this, 00:18:22.580 --> 00:18:25.040 and oh, you got to get this right version of the header. 00:18:25.040 --> 00:18:30.580 Yeah. And so if it only takes a week, people are super impressed and super happy. 00:18:30.580 --> 00:18:37.180 But for me and a bunch of my friends, it was just, we were like, no, this has to take like an hour maybe. 00:18:37.180 --> 00:18:44.880 It's too long. If we just spend a week to figure out how to run it before we start modifying it, it's too long. 00:18:45.240 --> 00:18:52.840 So at some point, we decided we need to do something about it or shut up complaining. 00:18:52.840 --> 00:18:55.120 Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of my philosophy as well. 00:18:55.120 --> 00:19:00.200 It's like, it's fine to complain and criticize, but it should come with a, but you should do this instead. 00:19:00.200 --> 00:19:02.120 Or here's how we're making it better, right? 00:19:02.120 --> 00:19:02.980 That's great. 00:19:03.700 --> 00:19:09.880 So fortunately, there was a, or there's a yearly hackathon hosted at CERN called the WebFest. 00:19:09.880 --> 00:19:13.720 And we're like, okay, going to take three days to try and build something. 00:19:13.720 --> 00:19:15.880 And at least we will have tried. 00:19:16.420 --> 00:19:23.860 So we started and the idea was to build something very similar to what we now call binder. 00:19:23.860 --> 00:19:30.420 What was exciting is that on the Saturday, so it's a weekend event on the Saturday morning or afternoon. 00:19:30.420 --> 00:19:41.580 I read an email from a Jeremy Freeman, who is the inventor or creator of my binder.org announcing my binder.org. 00:19:41.580 --> 00:19:44.820 I was like, oh, that sounds very much like what we're trying to do here. 00:19:45.420 --> 00:19:52.040 So from day one, that was, yeah, it was exciting to see that other people are trying to do the same thing. 00:19:52.040 --> 00:19:59.400 Yeah. For me, I then took a detour, just doing some more science and lost my, my connection to this. 00:19:59.400 --> 00:20:11.240 And I think it was three years ago, two or three years ago, a PyCon, somebody said, we're trying to restart my binder.org. 00:20:11.240 --> 00:20:13.440 We've seen you did something similar. 00:20:13.440 --> 00:20:14.320 Do you want to be involved? 00:20:15.320 --> 00:20:15.620 Okay. 00:20:15.620 --> 00:20:17.140 And since then, I've not managed to escape. 00:20:17.140 --> 00:20:20.200 They pulled you back in. 00:20:20.200 --> 00:20:20.700 Wonderful. 00:20:20.700 --> 00:20:21.860 Cool. 00:20:21.860 --> 00:20:23.780 Well, yeah, I mean, that totally makes sense. 00:20:23.780 --> 00:20:28.920 It sort of fits with that overall theme of reproducible science and that kind of stuff, right? 00:20:28.920 --> 00:20:29.860 Yeah. 00:20:29.860 --> 00:20:37.280 If you can't create the environment to rerun or play or experiment with the code, well, that's a pretty bad shot against reproducibility. 00:20:37.280 --> 00:20:38.100 Yes. 00:20:38.100 --> 00:20:40.140 I will leave it at that. 00:20:40.140 --> 00:20:42.200 For sure. 00:20:42.320 --> 00:20:42.620 All right. 00:20:42.620 --> 00:20:42.660 All right. 00:20:42.660 --> 00:20:53.400 So the way that I learned about binder is I would go to various GitHub repos and I would see a little launch binder badge, right? 00:20:53.400 --> 00:20:56.560 Like GitHub has all these little cool, I guess it's not really GitHub. 00:20:56.660 --> 00:21:00.980 Like you can just put all these little badges on top of your readme that appear. 00:21:00.980 --> 00:21:03.720 I guess it's a convention in GitHub. 00:21:03.720 --> 00:21:04.700 It doesn't come from GitHub. 00:21:05.120 --> 00:21:18.020 And it might say, this thing requires Python 3.5 or above, or the continuous integration is working, or there's 94% code coverage, or it could say, click here to launch this project in binder. 00:21:18.020 --> 00:21:28.700 Now, to me, that was always really impressive because, you know, it's not enough to just take the code from the repository or the notebook from the repository and just run it. 00:21:28.960 --> 00:21:29.160 Right. 00:21:29.160 --> 00:21:32.460 As you described, there's all these requirements potentially, right? 00:21:32.460 --> 00:21:43.600 Like if I'm using SciPy, you know, maybe that's not installed or more likely using some edge package that nobody knows about, or you need a certain version or whatever, right? 00:21:43.600 --> 00:21:46.760 There's a lot of specific requirements that have to happen. 00:21:46.760 --> 00:21:48.460 So to me, it just looked kind of like magic. 00:21:48.460 --> 00:21:58.480 Like, oh, you can click on this button, and then this thing runs, but I have no idea how it might run because it seems like the environment where it's going to run should be so specific. 00:21:58.480 --> 00:22:00.680 So how does this happen, right? 00:22:00.680 --> 00:22:03.920 And I guess, yeah, give us the rundown of how that happens. 00:22:03.920 --> 00:22:12.340 There's a pretty good little UI that you can get started with over at mybinder.org that talks you through it. 00:22:12.340 --> 00:22:13.640 But let's talk about what happens there. 00:22:13.640 --> 00:22:20.240 We use a little tool we built called repo2docker, and it does exactly what the name suggests. 00:22:20.240 --> 00:22:32.160 It will take your repository and will look at it and say, if there's an environment.yaml, it will go, okay, we need to install Python. 00:22:32.980 --> 00:22:44.200 Well, we need to install Conda, and then we need to run whatever the Conda command is to get all the stuff which is listed in the environment.yaml installed. 00:22:44.660 --> 00:22:53.120 And that really is 80% of what repo2docker does is it will look for these very well-known files. 00:22:53.120 --> 00:22:58.660 In the Python world, it's requirements.txt, environment.yaml, setup.py. 00:22:58.660 --> 00:23:04.000 Does it know, like, pipfile and pyproject.toml and those things? 00:23:04.300 --> 00:23:07.900 We have some support for both of those as well. 00:23:07.900 --> 00:23:11.120 It doesn't seem to be used as much. 00:23:11.120 --> 00:23:15.300 So I would say it's something that could do with more love. 00:23:15.300 --> 00:23:16.300 Sure. Okay. 00:23:16.480 --> 00:23:19.160 And then we have the same for the R community. 00:23:19.160 --> 00:23:27.020 They have a whole bunch of magic files that the community has agreed on using as a format for specifying things. 00:23:27.020 --> 00:23:28.100 The Julia community. 00:23:28.100 --> 00:23:33.940 Because the notebooks will support a bunch of different kernels these days, a bunch of different languages and runtimes. 00:23:33.940 --> 00:23:42.260 And so I guess one of the questions is, when I create a Python project, I don't typically tell it, you're a Python project. 00:23:42.260 --> 00:23:50.160 I mean, I guess the closest I ever get to that is I will have the gitignore be the Python default gitignore. 00:23:50.160 --> 00:23:53.040 But other than that, when I create a new project, I don't tell it it's Python. 00:23:53.040 --> 00:23:54.340 I just put Python files in there. 00:23:54.340 --> 00:24:00.620 But I might also put JavaScript files or less files or other things that could confuse you guys. 00:24:00.620 --> 00:24:05.700 So how do you, when you look at one of these projects, know, oh, this one's Python, that one's Julia? 00:24:05.700 --> 00:24:11.800 We don't try and guess that so much as we have a list of files that we recognize. 00:24:11.800 --> 00:24:16.840 So like, yeah, requirements.txt. 00:24:16.840 --> 00:24:29.260 And when we see that, we say, okay, now add like the commands to install Conda, add the commands to install these pip packages to a Docker file. 00:24:29.260 --> 00:24:31.360 And we build a Docker container for you. 00:24:31.360 --> 00:24:31.680 I see. 00:24:31.680 --> 00:24:35.720 So for example, if you see like a requirements.txt, you're like, aha, Python. 00:24:36.000 --> 00:24:36.360 Exactly. 00:24:36.360 --> 00:24:42.100 We don't try and like look at the files in the repo in general and try and deduce. 00:24:42.100 --> 00:24:46.620 Okay, there's 80% Python files and 20% JavaScript. 00:24:46.620 --> 00:24:51.240 Let's install Node and Python 3.7 or something like that. 00:24:51.240 --> 00:24:51.880 Yeah. 00:24:51.880 --> 00:24:54.160 It always makes me, I guess, frustrated or something. 00:24:54.260 --> 00:25:03.920 When I see that, the GitHub estimation of what the project is, you know, you can like click down and the languages and it'll show like, you know, 70% this, 20% that. 00:25:03.920 --> 00:25:06.360 Because sometimes there's just some huge file, right? 00:25:06.360 --> 00:25:11.600 Like maybe I have one notebook, but there's like a ton of output in that notebook. 00:25:11.600 --> 00:25:15.440 But it's otherwise pure Python straight files, .py files. 00:25:15.440 --> 00:25:17.600 And it'll say, this is like 80% Jupyter. 00:25:17.600 --> 00:25:19.820 Like, you know, not really. 00:25:19.820 --> 00:25:33.300 It's more like output from Jupyter that you're counting or I'll decide, you know, I want to bundle up some node packages and put them in the repo so I don't ever have to worry about them vanishing or changing or ever. 00:25:33.300 --> 00:25:34.800 Just put them there and they're fine. 00:25:35.160 --> 00:25:41.220 And then it becomes a JavaScript project because, you know, it's got more JavaScript than it does Python, but it's not really. 00:25:41.220 --> 00:25:42.680 It's just like the libraries, right? 00:25:42.680 --> 00:25:45.920 So I can see that that would be very fraught with error. 00:25:45.920 --> 00:25:46.280 Yeah. 00:25:46.280 --> 00:25:52.960 So instead, the slogan we have is we reward community best practices by automating them. 00:25:52.960 --> 00:25:59.240 We try and encourage people to just be boring and do the mainstream thing. 00:25:59.440 --> 00:26:08.520 And in exchange, we can automatically build a Docker container or Docker image for them, which does what they want to do. 00:26:08.520 --> 00:26:08.860 Right. 00:26:08.860 --> 00:26:14.840 So one of the main things and the way you solve the challenge I started outlining in the beginning is like, it seems like magic. 00:26:14.840 --> 00:26:19.020 Why is this thing that seems like it has a bunch of dependencies and is very specific? 00:26:19.020 --> 00:26:20.420 Just run when I click it. 00:26:20.420 --> 00:26:22.700 And it's because you've looked at the repository. 00:26:22.700 --> 00:26:23.940 You've followed these best practices. 00:26:23.940 --> 00:26:28.140 You've sort of guessed at the best practices and found what you're supposed to do. 00:26:28.140 --> 00:26:35.960 And then you defined a Docker file that then built an image that then you run as a container when you click the button. 00:26:35.960 --> 00:26:38.300 That sets up that environment, right? 00:26:38.300 --> 00:26:38.720 Yeah. 00:26:38.720 --> 00:26:44.300 And then, and all as a user, all you need to bring is something that is like a web browser. 00:26:44.500 --> 00:26:48.120 And then at the very end, we connect you to it and off you go. 00:26:48.120 --> 00:26:49.300 And to that, you have an environment. 00:26:49.300 --> 00:26:50.740 So that's pretty interesting. 00:26:50.740 --> 00:26:51.800 Where does that run? 00:26:51.800 --> 00:26:56.680 Well, we're lucky to have four clusters around the world now, which is fantastic. 00:26:56.680 --> 00:27:03.980 So we rely on people donating resources to run all these containers for people. 00:27:03.980 --> 00:27:08.260 And we have one cluster in Google Kubernetes engine. 00:27:08.460 --> 00:27:12.720 We have one at OVH, which is a European cloud hoster. 00:27:12.720 --> 00:27:17.220 We have one sponsored by the Turing Institute in London. 00:27:17.220 --> 00:27:28.320 And we have one bare metal Kubernetes cluster at a social science research institute in Germany, in Cologne, called GISIS. 00:27:29.100 --> 00:27:34.520 So they are really at the front, you know, none of this cloud hosting business. 00:27:34.520 --> 00:27:36.680 We run our own Kubernetes cluster. 00:27:36.680 --> 00:27:37.020 That's right. 00:27:37.020 --> 00:27:42.700 You go in there, you pull the cover off of the 1U server, and you can just see Binder right in there. 00:27:42.700 --> 00:27:44.100 Yeah. 00:27:44.100 --> 00:27:44.940 Yeah. 00:27:44.940 --> 00:27:45.840 That's really cool. 00:27:45.840 --> 00:27:48.620 Are you looking for more or is it, is that enough? 00:27:48.620 --> 00:27:49.100 Is it okay? 00:27:49.100 --> 00:28:06.460 So our master plan for how to make this sustainable is to encourage more and more research institutes or cloud providers to host a small chunk of mybinder.org. 00:28:06.660 --> 00:28:17.480 Because that way, each individual contributor doesn't have to pay a cloud bill, which is hundreds of thousands of dollars, but only maybe $20,000. 00:28:17.480 --> 00:28:38.860 And if you're a big research university like MIT or University of Oxford or someone like that, spending $20,000 on something which benefits you because you can use it at your university for your researchers, but also benefits the whole world, it's still a difficult sell. 00:28:38.860 --> 00:28:43.420 It's a much easier sell than if we come to you and say, do you have $200,000? 00:28:43.420 --> 00:28:44.660 And they're like, oh. 00:28:44.660 --> 00:28:45.940 In any currency, no. 00:28:45.940 --> 00:28:46.880 Yeah. 00:28:47.260 --> 00:28:50.780 People will just laugh at you and show you the door. 00:28:50.780 --> 00:28:52.500 So that's the plan. 00:28:52.500 --> 00:28:56.340 So the short answer to your question, are we looking for more, is yes. 00:28:56.340 --> 00:29:00.620 It would be very interesting to add more clusters to this. 00:29:00.620 --> 00:29:07.700 It should be easy to do technically now that we've gone from one to four. 00:29:07.700 --> 00:29:09.620 It should be easy. 00:29:09.620 --> 00:29:12.920 Pretty much after you go from one to two, that's the hardest step. 00:29:12.920 --> 00:29:14.060 Right? 00:29:14.060 --> 00:29:17.040 And then onward, it's not necessarily easy, but it's the... 00:29:17.040 --> 00:29:22.580 Going from a very bespoke, it's all matching this to like, now we have multiple environments. 00:29:22.580 --> 00:29:24.620 Well, that's a pretty big step, I would say. 00:29:24.620 --> 00:29:26.020 Yeah, that's true. 00:29:26.020 --> 00:29:36.640 It comes with its own challenges because now you have four times as many things that can go wrong or idiosyncrasies to deal with. 00:29:37.100 --> 00:29:45.780 But it's great to see that we can run on four so different Kubernetes flavors. 00:29:46.340 --> 00:29:58.340 And I think it's great because it keeps us honest when we say we are not building something which is tied to any one cloud provider and their secret source. 00:29:58.340 --> 00:30:01.720 So you can really take it and run it at home. 00:30:01.960 --> 00:30:02.100 Right. 00:30:02.100 --> 00:30:03.220 Yeah, that's super cool. 00:30:03.220 --> 00:30:14.400 So basically, if you have admin access, like Binder has admin access to a Kubernetes cluster, it can create containers and pods and then spin them up and spin them down. 00:30:14.400 --> 00:30:19.160 And like, it's basically just managing a Kubernetes cluster wherever that happens to run. 00:30:19.160 --> 00:30:19.640 Exactly. 00:30:19.640 --> 00:30:20.200 Yeah. 00:30:20.200 --> 00:30:20.480 Okay. 00:30:20.580 --> 00:30:20.940 Yeah. 00:30:20.940 --> 00:30:22.020 That's what we do. 00:30:22.020 --> 00:30:22.880 Yeah. 00:30:22.880 --> 00:30:25.480 That sounds very exciting, actually. 00:30:25.480 --> 00:30:25.900 That's cool. 00:30:25.900 --> 00:30:42.860 Now, one of the things that's probably worth mentioning is if I have a GitHub repository and I go through this effort, this minor effort described at mybinder.org to like set this up and register it and whatnot and get my little badge so people can run my code there. 00:30:42.860 --> 00:30:43.980 That's all well and good. 00:30:43.980 --> 00:30:46.960 But what happens as I make changes to my GitHub repository? 00:30:47.420 --> 00:30:55.820 Like, oh, I need a new version, a new library I'm going to add, or we're going to update this code, but it's going to require some underlying fundamental change to the environment. 00:30:55.820 --> 00:31:08.780 Every time you make a commit to your repository, when you then launch it, we check in our cache, do we already have an image for this commit of this repo? 00:31:08.780 --> 00:31:12.620 And if the answer is no, we will rebuild it or build it again. 00:31:12.620 --> 00:31:13.280 Right, right. 00:31:13.280 --> 00:31:17.800 Like probably you tag it by like git commit hash shah or something like that, right? 00:31:17.800 --> 00:31:18.520 Yeah, exactly. 00:31:18.520 --> 00:31:18.920 Okay. 00:31:18.920 --> 00:31:28.380 And that's nice because anytime you change your repository and add a new dependency, we will just automatically rebuild it next time. 00:31:28.620 --> 00:31:42.900 It has the disadvantage that it can take quite a long time to build your repository, depending on what crazy stuff you're trying to do, how many dependencies you need to install and compile from scratch. 00:31:43.080 --> 00:31:49.360 It can take a long time to build the Docker image for your repository. 00:31:49.360 --> 00:31:49.880 Right. 00:31:49.880 --> 00:31:53.700 Do you do anything like layer this? 00:31:53.700 --> 00:32:00.620 So with Docker, you can have like layers of Docker files and dependencies and it will just, it'll cache all of them and only build the changes. 00:32:00.620 --> 00:32:06.140 Do you do anything like here's the layer that is the dependencies of this project? 00:32:06.320 --> 00:32:16.920 And here's the layer that actually has the code because the dependencies probably change infrequently, whereas the code is probably, you know, 10, 100 times more likely to change. 00:32:16.920 --> 00:32:17.180 Right. 00:32:17.180 --> 00:32:18.920 And the slow part is not getting the code. 00:32:18.920 --> 00:32:23.720 The slow part is getting the pip install -r from their Ubuntu or whatever. 00:32:23.720 --> 00:32:24.420 Yeah. 00:32:24.420 --> 00:32:29.700 So we try and be clever about how we order the layers and the Docker. 00:32:29.700 --> 00:32:30.080 Right. 00:32:30.080 --> 00:32:30.260 Right. 00:32:30.300 --> 00:32:34.300 Because that's the trick to making it do the minimum work when a change happens. 00:32:34.300 --> 00:32:35.020 Yeah. 00:32:35.020 --> 00:32:41.940 What makes it tricky is that a lot of package managers allow you to do arbitrary stuff. 00:32:41.940 --> 00:32:53.120 We have a few, hopefully enough pieces of code that inspect your requirements.txt to try and figure out, are you referring to stuff in the rest of the repo? 00:32:53.120 --> 00:32:54.180 Yes or no? 00:32:54.180 --> 00:32:59.960 Because if you are, then we need to update the whole rest of the repo before we run your file. 00:32:59.960 --> 00:33:02.640 If no, then we can cache it. 00:33:02.640 --> 00:33:06.700 So, yeah, we try and be clever on that front. 00:33:06.700 --> 00:33:07.020 Right. 00:33:07.020 --> 00:33:14.660 Because your biggest expense, at least I think, there's actually a Jupyter notebook that talks about this, which we could get into, which is fun. 00:33:14.660 --> 00:33:17.020 But your biggest expense is compute, right? 00:33:17.020 --> 00:33:17.560 Yes. 00:33:17.560 --> 00:33:19.400 As opposed to storage or bandwidth or something. 00:33:19.400 --> 00:33:19.780 Yeah. 00:33:19.820 --> 00:33:23.740 We do have a fairly large Docker container registry. 00:33:23.740 --> 00:33:30.980 And the funny story about it is that for a very long time, we paid no attention whatsoever to it. 00:33:30.980 --> 00:33:42.700 And then one day in this notebook that you were referring, which shows you how much money we spend on which line item in our cloud build, we started noticing a new one. 00:33:43.160 --> 00:33:44.160 And we're like, what is this? 00:33:44.160 --> 00:33:45.840 Why is it getting bigger constantly? 00:33:45.840 --> 00:33:54.620 And it turns out that there was, I think, tens of terabytes of images in our container registry. 00:33:54.840 --> 00:34:01.800 And that is the level at which it starts being noticeable on our chart. 00:34:01.800 --> 00:34:02.700 Right, right, right. 00:34:02.700 --> 00:34:06.820 That's like $20,000 or $10,000 or something like that. 00:34:06.820 --> 00:34:08.180 But it's a non-trivial number. 00:34:08.180 --> 00:34:09.220 Yeah. 00:34:09.320 --> 00:34:16.180 So I actually haven't looked at our billing costs in quite a while. 00:34:16.180 --> 00:34:34.500 Before we had, when we only had two clusters, so that's probably at least half a year ago or so, we would say that it costs between $80,000 and $100,000 in Google Cloud cost to run mybinder.org. 00:34:35.040 --> 00:34:39.580 Yes, the vast majority of that is paying for the virtual machines. 00:34:39.580 --> 00:34:40.760 Right, right, right. 00:34:40.760 --> 00:34:47.400 If you're a regular listener of the podcast, you surely heard about Talk Python's online courses. 00:34:47.400 --> 00:34:49.500 But have you had a chance to try them out? 00:34:49.500 --> 00:34:52.740 No matter the level you're looking for, we have a course for you. 00:34:52.740 --> 00:34:59.100 Our Python for Absolute Beginners is like an introduction to Python plus that first-year computer science course that you never took. 00:34:59.100 --> 00:35:05.960 Our data-driven web app courses build a full PyPI.org clone along with you right on the screen. 00:35:05.960 --> 00:35:08.900 And we even have a few courses to dip your toe in with. 00:35:08.900 --> 00:35:14.240 See what we have to offer at training.talkpython.fm or just click the link in your podcast player. 00:35:16.580 --> 00:35:20.140 I guess that's worth talking about as well. 00:35:20.140 --> 00:35:23.920 So there's a notebook, which I'll put the link into the show notes. 00:35:23.920 --> 00:35:29.160 Basically, it's showing you the real-time, semi-real-time. 00:35:29.160 --> 00:35:30.620 You can adjust it. 00:35:30.620 --> 00:35:31.120 It's a notebook. 00:35:31.120 --> 00:35:34.980 The cost of over the day, over the week. 00:35:34.980 --> 00:35:37.300 And it's a non-trivial number, right? 00:35:37.400 --> 00:35:43.380 Like, I'm on the weekly cost, and it's showing, on average, maybe $1,000 a week plus a little bit more. 00:35:43.380 --> 00:35:44.460 You know, that's... 00:35:44.460 --> 00:35:50.680 I know open source is doing well these days, but that's a lot of money, $1,000 a week for compute. 00:35:50.680 --> 00:35:52.720 So where does that money come from? 00:35:52.720 --> 00:35:53.420 You talked... 00:35:53.420 --> 00:35:56.340 You sort of hinted at it before, but where does it come from? 00:35:56.340 --> 00:36:04.260 So the particular notebook there only tracks the cost we incur from Google. 00:36:04.260 --> 00:36:05.200 Okay. 00:36:05.200 --> 00:36:05.860 From the Google Cloud. 00:36:06.080 --> 00:36:08.480 Which is, like, not necessarily a quarter, but one of the four, right? 00:36:08.480 --> 00:36:08.860 Yeah. 00:36:08.860 --> 00:36:11.600 It's probably the biggest of the four. 00:36:11.600 --> 00:36:16.900 So I'll talk about how that bill gets paid. 00:36:16.900 --> 00:36:22.380 At the very beginning, we were fortunate enough to have a grant from the Moore Foundation, 00:36:22.380 --> 00:36:25.840 which included a chunk of money to pay for the bill. 00:36:25.840 --> 00:36:28.200 And that was several years ago. 00:36:28.200 --> 00:36:34.880 Now, we have friends, our benefactors at Google, 00:36:34.880 --> 00:36:40.920 who so far have been able to justify why Google should give us credits. 00:36:40.920 --> 00:36:41.840 I see. 00:36:41.840 --> 00:36:43.040 Are high enough to pay the bill. 00:36:43.040 --> 00:36:45.380 So that's fantastic to see. 00:36:45.380 --> 00:36:48.600 So in some sense, Google's donating that compute to the project. 00:36:48.600 --> 00:36:49.140 Yes. 00:36:49.140 --> 00:36:49.640 Yeah. 00:36:49.640 --> 00:36:49.980 Yeah. 00:36:50.100 --> 00:36:54.880 Have you considered reaching out to the other big groups like Azure and AWS? 00:36:54.880 --> 00:37:00.780 See if they want to be part of that party to get their name in some little halo effect? 00:37:00.780 --> 00:37:01.200 Yeah. 00:37:01.200 --> 00:37:07.000 So, I mean, that's how we got the cluster OVH, which is a European cloud hoster. 00:37:07.240 --> 00:37:11.700 They donate the compute resources for that cluster. 00:37:11.700 --> 00:37:17.180 The Turing Institute's cluster runs on Azure cloud. 00:37:17.620 --> 00:37:22.880 And I don't know exactly how the invoicing works there. 00:37:22.880 --> 00:37:30.980 But I would imagine that at least in some way it's sponsored or supported by Azure. 00:37:30.980 --> 00:37:43.040 The fact that the Turing Institute has enough spare money to finance such or donate resources for such an altruistic project. 00:37:43.260 --> 00:37:43.380 Yeah. 00:37:43.380 --> 00:37:44.100 Okay. 00:37:44.100 --> 00:37:48.740 It's really cool because it really shows you that, you know, this is, it's not free. 00:37:48.740 --> 00:37:51.360 And it's, I mean, at the core, right? 00:37:51.360 --> 00:37:54.660 Somebody, those images have to get built somewhere. 00:37:54.660 --> 00:38:00.340 They have to, the Docker containers and pods, Kubernetes pods have to run somewhere, right? 00:38:00.340 --> 00:38:06.420 And this is, and also probably, I know it's probably a small percentage of the people that touch the button, 00:38:06.420 --> 00:38:11.760 but it's still got to be a non-trivial amount of like real computational stuff happening, right? 00:38:11.820 --> 00:38:14.520 Like it's scientific in large part, I would imagine. 00:38:14.520 --> 00:38:14.920 Yeah. 00:38:14.920 --> 00:38:24.520 So luckily for us, most people who start a notebook spend a lot more time thinking and reading than running code. 00:38:24.520 --> 00:38:24.880 Yeah. 00:38:24.880 --> 00:38:30.920 So we can cheat and overcommit our CPUs by quite a large factor. 00:38:30.920 --> 00:38:31.160 Yeah. 00:38:31.160 --> 00:38:31.740 I would think. 00:38:31.740 --> 00:38:32.140 Yeah. 00:38:32.140 --> 00:38:35.560 But yeah, I mean, they're not sitting there idling. 00:38:35.560 --> 00:38:36.660 No, I'm sure. 00:38:36.660 --> 00:38:44.440 Also, this doesn't help for the Python file and VS Code angle, but it might help for the notebooks ways. 00:38:44.440 --> 00:38:49.580 Like a lot of those notebooks come pre-populated with the last data they had run, right? 00:38:49.580 --> 00:38:52.000 You don't have to run them to read them initially. 00:38:52.000 --> 00:38:52.740 Yes. 00:38:52.740 --> 00:38:55.200 Is that true for your setup or is that just true for GitHub? 00:38:55.200 --> 00:38:55.540 No. 00:38:55.540 --> 00:39:01.660 So if the notebook in your repository has the output still in it from the last time it was run, 00:39:01.660 --> 00:39:08.700 then we will show it to you because we use standard JupyterLab or Jupyter Notebook. 00:39:08.700 --> 00:39:09.260 Right, right. 00:39:09.260 --> 00:39:10.960 A UI to show it to you. 00:39:10.960 --> 00:39:17.380 And so that way you get something to read before you ever try and run code. 00:39:17.380 --> 00:39:17.700 Cool. 00:39:17.700 --> 00:39:18.060 Yeah. 00:39:18.060 --> 00:39:23.620 So maybe people actually load it up and never actually run it or they might not run the expensive bits or something. 00:39:23.700 --> 00:39:24.700 So that's got to help as well. 00:39:24.700 --> 00:39:24.980 Yeah. 00:39:24.980 --> 00:39:29.360 So then it's a very expensive way to view your notebooks. 00:39:29.360 --> 00:39:33.960 It would be good if you just want to read it. 00:39:33.960 --> 00:39:37.280 Just read it on GitHub or something, right? 00:39:37.280 --> 00:39:37.700 Yeah. 00:39:37.700 --> 00:39:46.580 If the GitHub viewer works well, then that's good because that's much cheaper to run than starting up a Docker container. 00:39:46.580 --> 00:39:47.100 For sure. 00:39:47.720 --> 00:39:53.480 And, you know, I guess there are definitely benefits that you have on interactivity as well, right? 00:39:53.480 --> 00:39:58.680 Like GitHub doesn't, it's kind of amazing that you can look at an output of a notebook and it looks like it ran, 00:39:58.680 --> 00:40:01.700 but it's just the cached version or saved version of whatever was before. 00:40:02.060 --> 00:40:07.440 But, you know, a lot of those have like the little widgets, those IPy widgets or whatever. 00:40:07.440 --> 00:40:07.700 Yeah. 00:40:07.700 --> 00:40:10.940 You have like little sliders that you can play with and like adjust it. 00:40:10.940 --> 00:40:16.920 And in order to do those types of explorations, even if you're not writing code, but you're kind of exploring parameters, 00:40:16.920 --> 00:40:19.560 you've got to have a real life system to do that, right? 00:40:19.720 --> 00:40:19.940 Yeah. 00:40:19.940 --> 00:40:20.320 Yeah. 00:40:20.320 --> 00:40:28.760 You need some kind of kernel connected to it to run the computations that are needed when you slide the slider to 11. 00:40:28.760 --> 00:40:29.240 Right. 00:40:29.240 --> 00:40:30.160 Yeah. 00:40:30.160 --> 00:40:30.800 Cool. 00:40:30.800 --> 00:40:39.420 Now, I think it's awesome that all these people are donating the compute to the environment and making this available to the entire world. 00:40:39.420 --> 00:40:51.760 But there might be situations where people want this type of system, but they, for some reason, can't put their data publicly out there or they don't want to link to it or they just want to keep it more controlled. 00:40:51.760 --> 00:41:03.860 Is there a way to take what you guys have built and say, create a mine, mine, all mine binder.org rather than, you know, like an internal version of it that's not just out there on the public cloud? 00:41:04.080 --> 00:41:04.220 Yeah. 00:41:04.220 --> 00:41:04.240 Yeah. 00:41:04.240 --> 00:41:12.380 So the software that is behind my binder.org is called binder hub, like Jupyter hub, but binder hub. 00:41:12.380 --> 00:41:17.560 And that's open source, like all other Jupyter projects as well. 00:41:17.560 --> 00:41:23.820 And you can deploy it yourself on your compute with your credit card. 00:41:23.820 --> 00:41:26.300 And then you can access private repositories. 00:41:26.300 --> 00:41:29.160 You can limit access to your binder instance. 00:41:29.580 --> 00:41:35.740 So you have to log in instead of right now where it will, it's completely open to the public. 00:41:35.740 --> 00:41:36.140 Sure. 00:41:36.140 --> 00:41:36.680 Yeah. 00:41:36.680 --> 00:41:39.440 So basically, once you have those links, you can just visit it. 00:41:39.440 --> 00:41:40.300 Like that's the point. 00:41:40.300 --> 00:41:42.220 You already emphasize that, right? 00:41:42.220 --> 00:41:47.320 That you're not even supposed to have an account, which is kind of the opposite of I need to keep this private. 00:41:47.320 --> 00:41:49.080 Exactly. 00:41:49.640 --> 00:41:56.920 And also because we take compute, which has been donated to us by people. 00:41:56.920 --> 00:42:04.860 We say, if you have private repositories, you probably also work for somebody who could pick up the bill themselves. 00:42:04.860 --> 00:42:11.300 So it's a political decision that we've disabled these features for my binder.org. 00:42:11.460 --> 00:42:14.700 But you can take the same software and run it yourself. 00:42:14.700 --> 00:42:17.500 And then you can access private repos. 00:42:17.500 --> 00:42:20.180 So basically, there's no technical limitation. 00:42:20.180 --> 00:42:28.680 But right now, in order to run one of your repositories on mybinder.org, it has to be a public repository. 00:42:28.680 --> 00:42:29.320 That's right. 00:42:29.320 --> 00:42:31.700 Because that's the zen that you guys are going after. 00:42:31.700 --> 00:42:35.060 That's the overriding philosophy of what you're doing, right? 00:42:35.060 --> 00:42:35.380 Yeah. 00:42:35.380 --> 00:42:35.700 Okay. 00:42:35.980 --> 00:42:38.320 Yeah, that sounds totally reasonable. 00:42:38.320 --> 00:42:48.220 Now, I guess this repo to Docker is also pretty interesting, potentially on its own, right? 00:42:48.220 --> 00:42:53.380 Like, it's cool that you guys are using it for capturing these environments. 00:42:53.380 --> 00:42:56.360 So you can run them on mybinder.org. 00:42:56.360 --> 00:43:00.260 But is that something people would find useful outside of that use case? 00:43:00.260 --> 00:43:01.360 Yes and no. 00:43:01.360 --> 00:43:03.260 There's nothing stopping you. 00:43:03.260 --> 00:43:05.080 Or we encourage people. 00:43:05.080 --> 00:43:06.880 For example, when they... 00:43:06.880 --> 00:43:10.100 So you can run repo to Docker locally on your laptop. 00:43:10.100 --> 00:43:15.540 And it will perform its little magic trick just as well as it does online. 00:43:15.540 --> 00:43:15.860 Right. 00:43:15.860 --> 00:43:24.700 We encourage people to do that, for example, if they're trying to debug why their binder isn't building or why it isn't doing quite what they want it to do. 00:43:24.700 --> 00:43:25.360 Oh, interesting. 00:43:25.360 --> 00:43:31.700 So if things are not working right, you're like, this container won't build or it's not finding the files or whatever it is, right? 00:43:31.700 --> 00:43:32.900 The volumes aren't mapped right. 00:43:32.900 --> 00:43:33.940 The ports aren't mapped right. 00:43:33.940 --> 00:43:38.400 You can play around with repo to Docker locally and get a better shot at figuring that out, huh? 00:43:38.400 --> 00:43:38.840 Exactly. 00:43:38.840 --> 00:43:40.960 Because you can see a lot more of the logs. 00:43:40.960 --> 00:43:45.360 The turnaround is potentially much, much faster because you have a more powerful machine. 00:43:46.160 --> 00:43:58.240 You're just more direct contact with it than if you have to control it via some web form with the log automatically scrolling paths and so on. 00:43:58.240 --> 00:43:58.420 Right, right. 00:43:58.420 --> 00:44:04.360 I'm going to go do another commit to the repo to force a GitHub webhook to go off and make it happen again or whatever. 00:44:04.360 --> 00:44:05.040 Yeah. 00:44:05.080 --> 00:44:05.500 Exactly. 00:44:05.500 --> 00:44:08.080 So you can use it locally. 00:44:08.080 --> 00:44:18.980 The disadvantage is that you probably don't have as big a library of cache Docker image layers on your laptop that repo to Docker uses. 00:44:19.140 --> 00:44:23.700 Potentially you have lots of them already because Docker is very good at filling up your hard drive. 00:44:23.700 --> 00:44:24.060 Right. 00:44:24.060 --> 00:44:27.980 It won't clean up any of those cached ones unless you run like a Docker cleanup. 00:44:27.980 --> 00:44:29.200 I forget the exact command. 00:44:29.200 --> 00:44:36.420 But yeah, it's really easy to fill up your computer with Docker images that are stale cached results, right? 00:44:36.680 --> 00:44:37.120 Exactly. 00:44:37.120 --> 00:44:39.580 So you can run it locally. 00:44:39.580 --> 00:44:47.440 I do run it locally once in a while to just get the environment that the author of the repository had in mind. 00:44:47.440 --> 00:44:55.940 However, what I'm finding is that if the repository builds on mybinder.org or with repo to Docker, 00:44:55.940 --> 00:45:01.220 because it's in some way very simple minded what repo to Docker recognizes, 00:45:01.220 --> 00:45:05.540 the instructions to do it by hand are also fairly straightforward. 00:45:05.540 --> 00:45:15.640 So if you're comfortable using Conda, then it's quicker to make yet another Conda environment and just do what the author wanted you to do. 00:45:15.640 --> 00:45:23.660 And because you can try whether it actually works by clicking on the badge in the readme and seeing it run on mybinder.org, 00:45:23.660 --> 00:45:26.740 you're like, yeah, I'm pretty sure the instructions are complete. 00:45:26.740 --> 00:45:31.440 And I'm not going to spend two hours and then find out that they forgot something. 00:45:31.440 --> 00:45:32.540 Sure, sure, sure. 00:45:32.540 --> 00:45:33.300 That's pretty cool. 00:45:33.300 --> 00:45:39.160 I guess maybe if it depended on Linux and you were on Mac or something like that, 00:45:39.160 --> 00:45:45.240 that might be a quick way to jumpstart a Docker container without knowing too much about Docker. 00:45:45.240 --> 00:45:49.160 But yeah, if it's a kind of standard environment, then there's probably not a huge benefit. 00:45:49.160 --> 00:45:49.460 Yeah. 00:45:49.800 --> 00:46:02.000 If you're on a different flavor of Linux or whatever, then yes, automating the build of the Docker container and have it run locally is great. 00:46:02.000 --> 00:46:09.040 And it is something people do, but it's, I would say, just not as convenient as clicking the link. 00:46:09.180 --> 00:46:11.220 So that's why not as many people are doing it. 00:46:11.220 --> 00:46:12.540 Yeah, for sure. 00:46:12.540 --> 00:46:13.740 It's easy. 00:46:13.740 --> 00:46:20.980 Can I get a public repository into mybinder.org that didn't decide to be in there? 00:46:21.480 --> 00:46:28.600 And what I mean is I've got to go through mybinder.org and put in the repo info and stuff in general to set this up. 00:46:28.600 --> 00:46:35.900 Could I just go, this one doesn't have a link, but I'm just going to give it to mybinder.org anyway and see what happens. 00:46:35.900 --> 00:46:36.220 Yeah. 00:46:36.220 --> 00:46:37.040 Yes. 00:46:37.320 --> 00:46:42.480 You don't have to be an author of the repo or have any special rights on the repo to launch it. 00:46:42.480 --> 00:46:42.700 Right. 00:46:42.700 --> 00:46:46.560 So with no account and it's required to be public, right? 00:46:46.560 --> 00:46:51.740 It's pretty hard to not fill out the form at mybinder.org with the info you want, right? 00:46:51.740 --> 00:46:52.200 Exactly. 00:46:52.200 --> 00:46:55.180 And a lot of projects will just work. 00:46:55.180 --> 00:46:55.460 Yeah. 00:46:55.460 --> 00:46:57.680 Because of the practices that you follow, right? 00:46:57.680 --> 00:46:58.120 Exactly. 00:46:58.120 --> 00:46:58.540 Yeah. 00:46:58.540 --> 00:47:02.060 So then you can open a pull request and add the badge to the readme. 00:47:02.060 --> 00:47:03.700 That's exactly what I was thinking. 00:47:03.700 --> 00:47:04.000 Yeah. 00:47:04.080 --> 00:47:14.580 So if you find a repo that should have a launch in Binder and yet it doesn't, a real nice way to make a simple contribution would be to go fill out mybinder.org. 00:47:14.580 --> 00:47:17.080 If it works, go do a PR with the details required. 00:47:17.080 --> 00:47:24.960 I mean, you could just edit the readme file on a branch, put the little icon there and submit that as the PR like here. 00:47:24.960 --> 00:47:26.260 I was missing this. 00:47:26.260 --> 00:47:26.780 I fixed it. 00:47:26.780 --> 00:47:27.060 Yeah. 00:47:27.060 --> 00:47:30.720 That's a super contribution for the project. 00:47:30.840 --> 00:47:38.260 It's a good way to get started and it will help whoever comes next to the project because they'll see the badge. 00:47:38.260 --> 00:47:45.500 And even if they don't yet know what mybinder.org is, they might click it and then they can run the examples. 00:47:45.500 --> 00:47:46.060 Yeah. 00:47:46.060 --> 00:47:49.860 It seems like a really nice, generous thing to do and super easy. 00:47:49.860 --> 00:47:50.480 Well, cool. 00:47:50.880 --> 00:47:57.880 So we're getting near the end of our time and I was going to ask you just a really quick sort of high level question. 00:47:57.880 --> 00:48:01.480 Looking back a bit on our conversation and your experience over time. 00:48:02.180 --> 00:48:11.580 People recently have been asking me, why do you think Python has become so popular in the data science and the scientific computing space over the last five years or so? 00:48:11.580 --> 00:48:16.920 You know, someone who worked at CERN and has been probably more involved in that than I have in a lot of ways. 00:48:16.920 --> 00:48:17.980 What are your thoughts? 00:48:17.980 --> 00:48:19.640 Why Python? 00:48:19.980 --> 00:48:23.280 Why did it become so much more popular recently? 00:48:23.280 --> 00:48:32.600 I think the short answer is I don't know because I've, since I was 15, thought Python is a pretty good language for programming. 00:48:32.600 --> 00:48:34.320 Finally, everyone agrees with me. 00:48:34.320 --> 00:48:35.460 Exactly. 00:48:35.760 --> 00:48:38.640 So I don't know what really what happened. 00:48:38.640 --> 00:48:57.160 I think part of it or why I think why Python, not some other language is there's a quote somebody else told me is you invite people to a job interview and make them write something on the, do some coding on the whiteboard or something like that. 00:48:57.400 --> 00:49:09.420 And they will write, even if they are, I don't know, C++ or Julia or whatever programmers, often they will write in something which looks very much like Python on the whiteboard. 00:49:09.420 --> 00:49:14.400 They will not put all the curly brackets. 00:49:14.400 --> 00:49:25.260 Or if you read Wikipedia, often there will be about algorithms, there will be a little section in pseudo code and you can almost copy and paste that and it will run. 00:49:25.260 --> 00:49:25.640 Right. 00:49:25.640 --> 00:49:29.240 So I think that's a killer feature in some sense. 00:49:29.240 --> 00:49:35.580 It makes it just so much more accessible to people who don't think of themselves as programmers. 00:49:35.580 --> 00:49:42.600 They are, they work in an insurance company and they want to do some data science. 00:49:42.600 --> 00:49:45.360 They don't think of themselves as programmers. 00:49:45.360 --> 00:49:47.840 They are, I don't know, actuaries or. 00:49:47.840 --> 00:49:48.660 Right, right, right. 00:49:48.660 --> 00:50:01.240 I think that agrees a lot with my general working theory is that Python is one of these special languages where it's as simple as possible to get started with like a tiny bit of computation. 00:50:01.240 --> 00:50:08.820 You don't even have to have a function, you know, forget compiling, linking, headers, static main voids, just like here's the three lines I want. 00:50:08.820 --> 00:50:10.060 I'm going to use those libraries. 00:50:10.060 --> 00:50:10.720 I'm going to do this. 00:50:11.600 --> 00:50:15.220 And so people easily get into it in the beginning. 00:50:15.220 --> 00:50:20.360 But then unlike a lot of easy languages, you don't really outgrow it. 00:50:20.360 --> 00:50:20.780 Right. 00:50:20.780 --> 00:50:25.380 It's not like, well, you can't use Python anymore because now we're doing astronomy or whatever. 00:50:25.380 --> 00:50:35.080 I was like, no, it's just, you just keep using the libraries and you can keep adding more computer science like concepts, functions, and then classes, then generators, then whatever. 00:50:35.080 --> 00:50:41.600 So I feel like it sucks people in who don't believe, just like you said, that they're programmers. 00:50:41.600 --> 00:50:45.240 They believe they're biologists, astronomers, physicists, whatever. 00:50:45.240 --> 00:50:49.400 But then it's kind of got this, like, well, I already know this. 00:50:49.400 --> 00:50:50.320 It's totally working. 00:50:50.320 --> 00:50:53.760 Why would I leave and pick up a harder language? 00:50:53.760 --> 00:50:55.980 Because there's just kind of this gravity. 00:50:55.980 --> 00:51:03.020 Like, once you get sucked into it, there's no reason to get kicked out of it because you can just keep growing with the language in the libraries. 00:51:03.020 --> 00:51:04.540 That's my theory as well. 00:51:04.540 --> 00:51:05.620 Yeah. 00:51:05.620 --> 00:51:07.200 Yeah, I think so too. 00:51:07.200 --> 00:51:29.460 And the fact that we can put a nice user interface in the programming language that you use Sense onto big, trusty Fortran and C++ libraries that have been around to do really heavy lifting, linear algebra and whatnot. 00:51:29.460 --> 00:51:31.540 I think that is fantastic. 00:51:32.120 --> 00:51:36.420 If you imagine Python didn't have that feature, then we would be stuck. 00:51:36.420 --> 00:51:38.840 We'd have to write all this stuff from scratch. 00:51:38.840 --> 00:51:39.620 Yeah. 00:51:39.620 --> 00:51:53.460 Like this, we can put a nice UI on Fortran code and get all the benefits of having well-tested Fortran code do crazy linear algebra for us. 00:51:53.460 --> 00:51:54.600 That's perfect. 00:51:54.600 --> 00:51:56.860 But not think about it ever again. 00:51:56.860 --> 00:52:00.120 Nice. 00:52:00.220 --> 00:52:00.380 All right. 00:52:00.380 --> 00:52:03.740 Well, yeah, that was definitely a good, insightful answer. 00:52:03.740 --> 00:52:04.560 I like it. 00:52:04.560 --> 00:52:05.080 All right. 00:52:05.080 --> 00:52:09.280 Now, before you get out of here, before we call the show, you've got to answer the final two questions. 00:52:09.280 --> 00:52:13.160 So, if you're going to write some Python code, what editor do you use? 00:52:13.160 --> 00:52:14.780 Today, I use Atom. 00:52:14.780 --> 00:52:15.220 Okay. 00:52:15.220 --> 00:52:16.160 Well, cool. 00:52:16.160 --> 00:52:16.960 Yeah, Atom is neat. 00:52:16.960 --> 00:52:20.960 My favorite editor probably is Emacs in a console. 00:52:21.320 --> 00:52:36.860 But at some point, I had to admit that I didn't want to spend as much time as I used to trying to understand how to get JavaScript tools to hook into my editor and auto-formatting stuff. 00:52:37.540 --> 00:52:39.960 So, yes, I use Atom now. 00:52:39.960 --> 00:52:40.860 Nice. 00:52:40.860 --> 00:52:42.040 Very cool. 00:52:42.040 --> 00:52:44.280 And then notable PyPI package. 00:52:44.280 --> 00:52:49.680 Maybe not something necessarily super popular, but something like, oh, I saw this and it was so cool. 00:52:49.680 --> 00:52:50.540 You should check it out. 00:52:50.540 --> 00:52:51.520 Need to think. 00:52:51.520 --> 00:52:54.400 While you're thinking, let me tell you about one thing that I ran across. 00:52:54.400 --> 00:52:58.000 It's not exactly that, but it's actually super cool. 00:52:58.000 --> 00:53:02.120 And I think it's relevant to the audience who would be interested in this topic as well. 00:53:02.700 --> 00:53:04.980 So, have you heard about Carnets? 00:53:04.980 --> 00:53:06.520 C-A-R-N-E-T-S? 00:53:06.520 --> 00:53:07.320 Carnets? 00:53:07.320 --> 00:53:07.900 No. 00:53:07.900 --> 00:53:14.880 So, this is a standalone Jupyter Notebook environment that runs on iOS. 00:53:14.880 --> 00:53:25.040 Not like the browser sees it, but it actually has NumPy and SciPy and all that stuff installed and Python executing disconnected on iOS. 00:53:25.040 --> 00:53:28.580 So, we could put that one out there for sure. 00:53:28.940 --> 00:53:32.760 And that's cool and it's open source and people can go check it out. 00:53:32.760 --> 00:53:34.340 It does uncertainties. 00:53:34.340 --> 00:53:36.940 So, maybe, yeah, it is actually just called uncertainties. 00:53:36.940 --> 00:53:38.420 Oh, nice. 00:53:38.420 --> 00:53:39.100 That's a good name. 00:53:39.100 --> 00:53:39.460 Yeah. 00:53:39.460 --> 00:53:45.240 So, it lets you put in numbers with uncertainties on them. 00:53:45.240 --> 00:53:45.560 Okay. 00:53:45.560 --> 00:53:54.940 And then you can do complicated computations on it and it will spit out, you know, the answer is three plus or minus 1.7. 00:53:55.660 --> 00:53:56.160 Right, right. 00:53:56.160 --> 00:54:01.840 Because if you have plus or minus 1, but then you square it and then you add this other uncertainty to it, right? 00:54:01.840 --> 00:54:05.740 Like, the propagation of uncertainty is not obvious. 00:54:05.740 --> 00:54:06.880 It's uncertain even. 00:54:06.880 --> 00:54:07.820 Yeah. 00:54:08.000 --> 00:54:14.100 I mean, it's one of these things where it's not difficult, but it's hard to do right. 00:54:14.100 --> 00:54:14.400 Yeah. 00:54:14.400 --> 00:54:14.480 Yeah. 00:54:14.480 --> 00:54:16.420 You very easily make mistakes. 00:54:16.420 --> 00:54:17.240 So, yeah. 00:54:17.240 --> 00:54:17.560 That's cool. 00:54:17.560 --> 00:54:18.140 Uncertainties. 00:54:18.140 --> 00:54:19.020 That's a cool package. 00:54:19.020 --> 00:54:19.180 Okay. 00:54:19.180 --> 00:54:19.900 Uncertainties. 00:54:19.900 --> 00:54:20.220 Nice. 00:54:20.220 --> 00:54:28.380 Another one that's kind of in that realm is Pint, which lets you do different units and multiplications and divides and whatnot. 00:54:28.380 --> 00:54:29.040 It's pretty cool. 00:54:29.040 --> 00:54:30.060 Okay. 00:54:30.060 --> 00:54:30.580 Very cool. 00:54:30.720 --> 00:54:32.480 That's a good recommendation indeed. 00:54:32.480 --> 00:54:33.220 All right, Sam. 00:54:33.220 --> 00:54:34.240 Well, we're about out of time. 00:54:34.240 --> 00:54:36.780 So, maybe a final call to action. 00:54:36.780 --> 00:54:41.700 People are excited about mybinder.org and this whole concept that we talked about. 00:54:41.700 --> 00:54:42.500 What do they do? 00:54:42.500 --> 00:54:43.300 Try it out. 00:54:43.300 --> 00:54:44.780 Tell a friend about it. 00:54:44.780 --> 00:54:47.880 That is, I think, an easy thing to do. 00:54:47.880 --> 00:54:52.560 And you can get it done because it's easy. 00:54:52.560 --> 00:54:52.960 Yeah. 00:54:52.960 --> 00:54:53.660 Yeah. 00:54:53.660 --> 00:54:57.320 It looks like you've automated a lot and it looks really not hard at all to get started with. 00:54:57.320 --> 00:54:57.560 Yeah. 00:54:57.560 --> 00:55:17.020 And, of course, we would be super happy if people find mistakes or want to add new features if they stop by and make code contributions, make contributions to the documentation, or help us deal with the fact that there's so many people who use it. 00:55:17.020 --> 00:55:25.080 If you have questions, you can contribute to mybinder.org, especially if you can't program. 00:55:25.080 --> 00:55:31.080 That's actually an asset because there's lots of people who know how to program, who help run mybinder.org. 00:55:31.080 --> 00:55:40.600 But explaining how it works, advertising it, giving talks about it, all that kind of good stuff. 00:55:40.600 --> 00:55:44.360 Adding launch and binder to various repositories that should have it. 00:55:44.360 --> 00:55:44.700 Yeah. 00:55:44.700 --> 00:55:46.140 For example, yeah. 00:55:46.520 --> 00:55:48.300 Yeah, those are pretty straightforward things to do. 00:55:48.300 --> 00:55:48.580 Awesome. 00:55:48.580 --> 00:55:49.360 All right. 00:55:49.360 --> 00:55:53.140 Well, it was great to learn more about mybinder.org and what you guys are up to. 00:55:53.140 --> 00:55:54.760 Thanks for being on the show. 00:55:54.760 --> 00:55:57.460 Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. 00:55:57.460 --> 00:55:58.640 Yeah, you bet. 00:55:58.640 --> 00:55:59.000 It was great. 00:55:59.000 --> 00:55:59.500 Bye. 00:55:59.500 --> 00:55:59.880 Bye. 00:55:59.880 --> 00:56:03.700 This has been another episode of Talk Python To Me. 00:56:03.700 --> 00:56:09.500 Our guest on this episode was Tim Head, and it's been brought to you by Linode and Talk Python's online courses. 00:56:09.500 --> 00:56:14.260 Start your next Python project on Linode's state-of-the-art cloud service. 00:56:14.520 --> 00:56:18.580 Just visit talkpython.fm/linode, L-I-N-O-D-E. 00:56:18.580 --> 00:56:21.880 You'll automatically get a $20 credit when you create a new account. 00:56:21.880 --> 00:56:24.460 Want to level up your Python? 00:56:24.460 --> 00:56:29.320 If you're just getting started, try my Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps course. 00:56:29.580 --> 00:56:37.460 Or if you're looking for something more advanced, check out our new async course that digs into all the different types of async programming you can do in Python. 00:56:37.460 --> 00:56:42.140 And of course, if you're interested in more than one of these, be sure to check out our Everything Bundle. 00:56:42.140 --> 00:56:44.020 It's like a subscription that never expires. 00:56:44.020 --> 00:56:46.160 Be sure to subscribe to the show. 00:56:46.160 --> 00:56:48.660 Open your favorite podcatcher and search for Python. 00:56:48.660 --> 00:56:49.800 We should be right at the top. 00:56:50.220 --> 00:56:58.780 You can also find the iTunes feed at /itunes, the Google Play feed at /play, and the direct RSS feed at /rss on talkpython.fm. 00:56:59.220 --> 00:57:00.860 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. 00:57:00.860 --> 00:57:02.380 Thanks so much for listening. 00:57:02.380 --> 00:57:03.420 I really appreciate it. 00:57:03.420 --> 00:57:05.180 Now get out there and write some Python code. 00:57:05.180 --> 00:57:25.640 I'll see you next time.