Learning Bootcamp Tutorials

Content best practices

We put a lot of stuff in notebooks to give users an interactive learning experience. Typically this redirects them to Google Colab.

Store notebooks first and foremost in a Git repository (repo still tbc, since it needs to be a public repo for Colab access, and LP is currently closed)
A good way to work with notebooks in a local Git repo is Jupyter Lab. Remember to run in a venv!
Create a new folder under /src/tutorials for your notebook. That way if it downloads stuff it won't mess up the directory tree.
When you've pushed your notebook you can import it into Colab from GitHub. Any changes to the notebook in the repo will be synced automatically.

We use Git for everything else
This maintains a standardized URL scheme for any notebooks on Colab
Google love to sunset things. If they sunset Colab we'll still have our notebooks
If you don't, Alex will shout at you 😉

If you're mentioning Colab, remember it's "Google Colab" with one l. Not Collab, Colllllab or Colllllllllab.
Before pushing, clear all outputs and save the notebook
For a nicer notebook experience (more native progress bars, etc), !pip install ipywidgets (no need to import)
Remember, Colab doesn't save state or get other files from the repo except your notebook. So you'll either need to !wget <somewhere>/requirements.txt or !pip install <dependencies> in the notebook itself.
That said, we encourage you to treat the repo like a proper repo, not just a place to put your notebook. Put a README, .gitignore, other relevant files. That way when another dev needs to fix/update it, they have a consistent environment.
First test locally, then on Colab. It's easy to forget things since Colab doesn't store state 😠
If you have a lot of helper functions, create a helper.py and !wget it
Jupyter and Colab have some rare bugs where one notebook won't work on the other platform. There seems to be neither rhyme nor reason to this 🤷
To not overflow your notebook with terminal output (when using CLI) commands, tell them to stfu