SciPy 2023

Our tutorial should appeal to scientists and software developers alike. We hope to convince you that web applications are excellent tools for improving the accessibility of scientific data and software and provide you with the know-how to develop one that accommodates growth and collaboration. The structure of the tutorial is based on a true story about a little Jupyter Notebook…

One day, a research scientist created the Notebook to do some exploratory development. After a while, that Notebook grew into a reusable workflow for creating a helpful visualization the scientist often ran for different parameters. The scientist eventually recognized that their workflow might be worth sharing, so they started working with a software developer to help the little Notebook grow into a web application. At first, the developer replaced hardcoded inputs into interactive ipywidgets, and used Voila` to hide the code cells from users. That was the day the little Notebook became a dashboard, but its journey didn’t stop there. Over time, the researcher had new ideas about features they wanted to add, so the developer transformed the dashboard into a tab-based web application that could accommodate more steps with rich instructions.

But there was a problem. The Notebook started experiencing growing pains. It contained more code than was comfortable. The developer made the notebook feel better by offloading some of the code into python modules. This worked well for logic, but as the application grew more complex, it was important to develop nested widget components in the visual Notebook environment. At first, the developer coded views in extra notebooks, and then copy-pasted the code into the python module, but this became laborious and confusing. One day, the developer started to write a tool that would export code cells from the notebooks into python modules. That way, the developer could code entirely in notebooks, and they could leave in all the markdown and code cells that documented what they were thinking as they designed the tool. That was the day that the little Notebook became a literate Notebook family.

Not long after, the developer was listening to the Talk Python to Me podcast, and heard someone mention a tool called nbdev. The tool was just like the one the developer had made, except it had many more useful features, like notebook-friendly git commits and merges. Eureka! Finally, the developer could accommodate increasing complexity with simple tools. When the developer gave the Notebook family back, the researchers were able to maintain it themselves, without having to download scary IDEs, extensions, or environments. And they all lived happily ever after.