Jupyter Environment Management for Dummies

This is another one of those “I kept googling the same thing over and over again” things that needed a post, except this time I made an issue to make a post and then started to repeatedly refer to that. TL;DR When you want to spin up an experimental environment and get it tied in to your Jupyter environment of choice (I actually quite like JupyterLab Desktop these days…), you need two steps. ...

January 17, 2024 · Andrew Bolster

A Stranger in a Strange Land: Data Science Onboarding In Practice

This talk was originally prepared for the 2020 Northern Ireland Developers Conference, held in lockdown and pre-recorded in the McKee Room in Farset Labs Intro Data Science is the current hotness. While those of us in these virtual rooms may make fun of the likes of Dominic Cummings for extolling a ‘Data Driven Approach’ to policy, the reality is that Data Science as a buzzword bingo term has survived and indeed thrived in a climate where ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is increasingly derided as being something that’s written more in PowerPoint than Python, ‘Machine Learning’ still gives people images of liquid metal exoskeletons crushing powdery puny human skulls, and those in management with long memories remember what kind of mess “Quantitative Analysis” got us into not too long ago… ...

October 20, 2020 · Andrew Bolster

Daily Dated Untitled Jupyter Notebooks

I am a heavy user of Jupyter Notebook, both personally for wrapping my head around Open Data, professionally for analysis and reporting, and for education/presentations. So am very comfortable with just spinning up new notebooks all over the show. However, this ends up looking like this… Less than informative and impossible to work out WTF I was doing. Helpfully, there’s a way to change it. In your jupyter_notebook_config.py file (Normally in ~/.jupyter), add the following somewhere sensible ...

October 22, 2018 · Andrew Bolster

IPython Websocket Failure on Chrome

IPython is an amazing tool, and in particular IPython Notebook, which is easily the best ‘python scratch-pad’ I’ve ever used. However, a while ago something strange happened to my set up and I’m not entirely sure when or how but either way, here’s how I ‘fixed’ it. The Problem TL;DR Can’t execute anything at all using Chrome, works fine in other browsers. WebSocket connection failed A WebSocket connection could not be established. You will NOT be able to run code. Check your network connection or notebook server configuration ...

Andrew Bolster

My Basic (Python) Data Science Setup

After last weeks return to posting, I thought it was time to do something vaguely useful (and actually talk about it) so I’m tidying up a few meetup sessions I’ve presented at into a series of Basic Data Science (with Python) posts. This is the first one and covers my Python environment, the Jupyter notebook environments I use for analysis, and some on the Plot.ly graphs and RISE / Reveal.js methods I use to turn those notebooks into presentations. ...

Andrew Bolster