JupyterDay NYC

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the first JupyterDay Conference in NYC. This was a one day event discussing the open source project Jupyter, formerly known as IPython Notebook.

I had a wonderful time at the event. All of the speakers were engaging and I got a lot of great ideas for what I want to learn about to strengthen my technology and data science skills.

I took extensive notes and can't compile them all here. Instead, here are a few highlights from the event:

• Jeremy Singer-Vine, BuzzFeed - Jeremy is a Data Editor at BuzzFeed, and does data investigative journalism. BuzzFeed does quantitative analysis for some of their news stories and will back up their news stories with research posted on github that readers can verify. For example, this news story and this notebook. I wish more journalists were this transparent.

• Doug Blank, Bryn Mawr - Doug talked about how Jupyter is changing education at his college. Everything is a notebook there. Students submit notebooks for their homework assignments. They've built many extensions to Jupyter to support this. The most fascinating is they have kernels for many other languages like BASIC, Assembly, and Pascal. I am going to set these up on my computer very soon.

• Sylvain Corlay, Bloomberg - Sylvain is a quant at Bloomberg. He showed us a demo of a new plotting library called bqplot they will share with the community. He employed ipython widgets to interact with the charts.

These were just a few of yesterday's speakers. The attendees were supportive and bright as well. I had many thought provoking conversations about data analysis and now have a list of tools I want to learn about as soon as I can.

All in all, a great day. Very glad I signed up for this.