Jupyter, Docker, and Atlas for Astronomy

Not These People

These People

This Person

• Founder of Atlas, O'Reilly Media's next generation authoring tool
• Author of DDS Field Guide and Docker Jumpstart
• Executive sponsor for beta.oreilly.com
• Currently exploring how to produce "next generation content"

Atlas: O'Reilly's Publishing Toolchain

• Supports HTML, AsciiDoc, Markdown, DocBook
• About 80% of our tech books are written in one of these formats.

Getting Beyond Books

• Books are great, but they lack the features that makes the Notebook such an amazing experience: interactivity, immediacy, video, etc.
• This is what learners (not just readers) expect

Jupyter + Docker + tmpnb + Atlas

• Jupyter. Other than git and GitHub, we've never had authors demand a tool more than Jupyter.
• Docker. Docker is like an ultralight VM that can makes it simple to package and deploy the content and all its dependencies.
• tmpnb. A lightweight system for creating ephemeral Docker containers that run Jupyter. (Powers the Nature demo.)
• Atlas. Creates a simple workflow to tie the pieces together

The (Idealized!) Process

• Tim O'Reilly announced support for Jupyter in May.
• You write in the Notebooks, like always.
• Use git to check the Notebooks into Atlas for collaboration.
• Atlas builds a book, ebook, or site.
• Use ipymd streamline markdown workflow

Version 0.1: Just Enough Math

• Hosted Notebooks on Docker+tmpnb for a Strata tutorial.
• Great concept, but performance was an issue. (Static assets, etc)
• Catastrophic failure mode. (No content at all!)

Thebe: Jupyter Cells As a Service

• Jupyter code cells that can be embedded in static web pages.
• Thebe. MIT-licensed plugin @zischwartz based on minrk/singlecell
• Supports widgets, plots, and the wide range of Jupyter display protocols.
• Separates serving of static assets from the notebook.
• Much more graceful failure mode.

Turns Static Code

	     <pre data-executable='true'>
	        x = np.linspace(0, n, 1000)
	        plt.plot(x, np.sin(x), x, np.cos(x))
	        sns.set()
	        plt.plot(x, np.sin(x), x, np.cos(x))
         </pre>
	

beta.oreilly.com

• Data visualization with Seaborn
• Introduction to Support Vector Machines
• Simple Line Plots with Matplotlib
• Three-dimensional Plotting in Matplotlib
• An illustrated introduction to the t-SNE algorithm

Applications to Teaching Astronomy

• Lincoln Greenhill and Danny Price experimenting with radio astronomy..
• Edit in the Notebook
• Transform ipynb into HTML with Thebe. (Still a manual, hand-wavy process at this point.)
• Build PDF and EPUB with Atlas