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Jupyter/Python has been game changing for me. I'm not a commercial software developer, but a scientist working on technology development. I've been programming for 30+ years. Jupyter has become my lab notebook. In the past, I always had illegible, disorganized notebooks, files, and program code, all over the place. A Jupyter notebook lets me organize all of that stuff in one place, in a narrative fashion, allowing me to reconstruct what I did, long after I've forgotten the details. The reasons for open communication of methods and results to the public, also apply to internal work. My notebooks become my reports. I've abandoned PowerPoint, and my colleagues, including managers, don't seem to mind. Seeing the actual work might actually give them a feeling of involvement, like inviting them into the lab. They're also a good way of communicating a prototype of a process to the software development team, when an idea ends up in a product. Even if they don't like Python, the programmers can read and understand it. I can actually run some of my data acquisition code directly within Jupyter. A code cell that spits out an inline graph is practically the default interface for a lot of this kind of work, so I don't have to build a unique GUI for every kind of test. This speeds up incremental refinement of an experimental technique, even if the routines that I write end up in a "straight" Python program when it's time to let an experiment run for a few hours or days. Granted, Jupyter won't turn bad programmers into good. Learning good programming methods is still a gap in the education of scientists. |