C.A.M. Gerlach
Sessions
"Python packaging is a rapidly changing landscape, plagued by many hurdles and challenges for users. The scientific Python community faces some of the greatest difficulties of anyone here, given the high reliance on external binaries and compiled code, the diversity of packaging ecosystems (PyPI, Conda, others), and the fact that many if not most users are not professional software engineers, like in other ecosystems. This is made all the more critical by the importance of reproducible research, and its sensitivity to even small dependency changes.
We'd like to build on the recent momentum behind evolving the packaging landscape to better serve these needs and building bridges between key players in the core Python and scientific spaces, with an intense, engaging and open discussion. This will bring together the key community stakeholders and everyday package authors to sync up on best practices, strengthen collaboration, and help come to consensus that would take months or even years if not for in-person discussion, as well as provide a jumping-off point for followup conversations and future action items."
"Notebooks can be a powerful tool for the purposes for which they were designed—learning, experimenting, and sharing results. However, users face many challenges when trying to achieve true reproducbility with notebooks alone, including lack of dependency management, pitfalls of non-linear interactive execution, and requiring bespoke tooling to open and execute. Furthermore, there is a growing need to go beyond reprodubility of individual results—siloed into an opaque format possessing limited interoperability with the rest of the Python ecosystem—toward reusuability of research methods, that can be shared, built upon, and deployed by users across the world.
Therefore, we invite the community to share their tools and workflows to go beyond reproducibility and towards true reusable science, built on the shoulders of giants. Furthermore, we hope to explore how we can encourage users and the community to move beyond the notebooks monoculture and toward a holistic, open, modular and interoperable approaches to conducting research and developing scientific code."