[flyaway]

I spend about 8 months of the year teaching pandas to journalism students, and it's a wild ride! Despite some of the iffy syntax and pandas' seeming inability to standardize parameter names, the students seem to grok the workflow much more quickly than wrangling lists and dictionaries in the "normal" world of Python.

I know everyone loves the reproducibility Notebooks supposedly bring to the table, but without a doubt my favorite part is the ability to export super-unattractive matplotlib charts as PDF, clean them up in Illustrator, and suddenly find yourself with publication-quality graphics. Knowing you're producing something more than just some numbers to toss in a story can be a strong sell to a lot of folks.