Dear friends,
Machine learning engineers routinely use Jupyter Notebooks for developing and experimenting with code. They’re a regular feature in DeepLearning.AI’s courses. But there’s another use of Jupyter Notebooks that I think is under-appreciated: communicating concepts to others.
For example, once I was experimenting with a new way to build a neural network in which the input features were engineered a specific way, and I wanted to explain my ideas to colleagues. Writing a text document would have been a reasonable approach, but using a Jupyter Notebook allowed me to format text using its Markdown feature and include an implementation of the idea in code. That way, readers could execute it, experiment with hyperparameters, and add further code to delve more deeply into what the algorithm was doing.
When we use a Jupyter Notebook to build a piece of code, the ultimate reader is a computer, whose job is to faithfully execute the program. But when using a Notebook to communicate with people, the goal is to convey an idea and illustrate it with code. The interactive nature of notebooks — which lets you run code snippets to generate outputs, and also lets you add formatted text, equations, graphs, and images — makes this a much richer medium than merely writing code that contains comments.
A team I work with recently used a Jupyter Notebook to model their revenue projections. While other tools such as spreadsheets could have served a similar purpose, a Notebook can include prose that articulates underlying assumptions such as the rates of sales growth and customer churn. Further, it invites readers to play with these parameters to deepen their understanding of how they affect the business.
I write and send a lot of documents and enjoy written communication. But if you’re trying to explain a scientific or mathematical equation, simulating a business or other system, or presenting your analysis of data, consider sending your audience a Jupyter Notebook. This flexible tool even makes a great alternative to a slide deck. It’s great not only for writing code to communicate with your computer but also for crafting a story to communicate with other people.
Keep learning!
Andrew