Disclaimer
This is my first article ever written on a blog and the first long format written text in years, so treat it gently 🙂
Excerpt from “Who am I?”
Long story short, I’m a law decree graduate who at a certain point in his adult life decided he wanted to switch to computer science and programming as this was his passion since childhood.
After several years of writing SQL scripts, retrieving data, cleaning, analyzing and presenting it, I found out that what I was doing is called data analysis and there’s a whole chapter in Computer Science dedicated to it… so I decided I needed to learn more.
Introduction about the course
One of the resources I bumped into was a livestream on Freecodecamp’s YouTube channel called Data Analysis with Python: from zero to pandas. It would be a 6 part weekly 2 hour livestream that thought Python and Pandas for Data analysis.
This wasn’t my first rumble with Python or Pandas but I had never sat through an entire course and only used the modules/functions/libraries I needed for various work projects. Plus, at the end, I would receive a Course Completion Certificate.
The course is now fully available in this Freecodecamp Youtube playlist.
During the course, between the Livestream sessions, we had to do some home tasks and submit them for evaluation. To do this we used a notebook sharing platform called Jovian where, after creating an account (at the moment of writing this, only GitHub and Google enabled), we would be able to save and share notebooks.
How does it work?
Using one of the following publicly available free notebook platforms: Kaggle (Google), Colab (also Google), Binder (or locally installed Jupiter server), you install a module called jovian (wink-wink), and will be able to create or update public (or private) projects on the jovian.ml personal profile.
The notebooks are version-control enabled so, with ever new commit, you create another version and will be able to switch between them (haven’t dove to deep but I think only through the website interface).
What are it’s benefits
Now this is not a full review and I would refrain from installing the jovian module on your own computer, but what I see at the moment as a main benefit, aside from sharing public notebooks, is being able to embed notebook cells to other websites or blog posts such as this one.
Embedding
You can embed code+output cells:
Only code:
Only output:
Or entire worksheets… which I’m not going to share here 🙂
Ease of use
Running a saved notebook is enabled by links to the above mentioned platforms where the notebook will be uploaded.
Drawbacks
As i mentioned, this is just a sneak peak, not a full review, so I’m just gonna mention the hiccups I noticed. The website breaks internal links, disabling easy notebook walkthrough. It also seems to disable custom output size.
A full example of Jovian website usage
The final step of the above linked course was an analysis on a real dataset. That would prove our understanding of Python, Pandas and Visualization libraries.. Sneak-peeks from the project will be available in the following article.
