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by riordan
2868 days ago
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One of the under-appreciated aspects of Colaboratory is that it's completely integrated into the Google Drive ecosystem, including multiple real-time users of the same notebook (sharing the same VM). This was a real game-changer for me. The real-time use-case has a nice wow factor to it; I've used it as a way to pair program for data science problems. The input cells sync in real-time (a la Google Docs), and so too do the output cells when one person runs a cell. And it's nice to be able to leave comment threads on a cell that can be resolved as a form of peer review. But what made Colab a game-changer for me is how it let me seamlessly put my notebooks and a VM into Google Drive, making anything I put in a notebook accessible to anyone within my organization without needing to set up an environment, be it shared or local. My last organization was a small rare disease research foundation, and I primarily worked on the fundraising side of the house; it was not a technical organization. When thinking about the longevity of my work, I realized that even the one person managing IT for them probably couldn't set up, let alone justify maintaining a networked Jupyter environment. So rather than ask for that and store all my analyses and small utilities on GitHub, I built everything on top of Google Drive and Collab. Folks were used to using Drive for everything else, so it meant my work was adjacent and discoverable to the team it was pertinent to and they could get access to both the outcomes of prior runs or change a few variables and run it again without me being needed. I left recently and I've still heard from a few former colleagues that they're still using many of the these notebooks and discovering others I'd built on their own time. For a small data analysis operation in a Google Apps organization, Colaboratory is a godsend. |
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