Tutorial Feedback from PyCon US

[jcrist]

Participant feedback

• [x] Introduce joins better and before we first use them
• [ ] Maybe improve join documentation in ibis itself
• [ ] Add mapping to Table.rename docstring
• [x] Don't use jupyterlab, just use codespaces directly
• [ ] More ibis context at the beginning
  • Why ibis?
  • Ibis is opensource
  • How to install
  • Where does ibis sit in the space of tools
    • How does it differ from other tools like sqlalchemy
  • What pain points does it solve?

Our Feedback

• [ ] Design slides/intro better to cover setup issues/late arrivals so by the time we start executing things everyone should be ready.
• [ ] Maybe move to using postgres for notebook 1 instead of duckdb to better differentiate client & backend architecture.
• [ ] Hammer more on how performant duckdb is
• [x] Notebook 1 also shows to_* methods, maybe want to diminish that there in favor of notebook 2.
• [x] Introduction of _ in notebook 2 feels a bit off. It works, but it's distracting.
  • Maybe add at the end of notebook 1 after doing a complex compound expression (motivation) to close out section on expressions.
• [x] Perhaps we want to redesign notebook 2 to be more about data import/export rather than "python ecosystem" things? Could talk more here about the ibis.read_* methods as well as create_table maybe.
• [x] Notebook 3 still downloads the data when that's already done in notebook 0.
• [x] Notebook 0 all downloads should be scripted so they don't need to repeat once they've been done.
• [ ] Better mix exercises in notebook 1
• [x] Don't use %load for solutions, instead make use of html summary/detail tags to do dropdowns in a markdown box.
• [x] Better contrast on slides (no darkmode for projectors)
• [x] At end of notebook 1 it might be good to poke around live at tab completion/existence of other methods on ibis.Table
  • Maybe have an exercise where they poke around and try a method we didn't talk about?
• [ ] Add more "optional extras" to exercises to better occupy speedy students.

[cpcloud]

After trying in vain to get details/summary tags to work, they just show up as comments in the rendered notebook.

I say we give up on that for now.