Microblogging + Nbdev?

nbdev
1

Can we flesh this idea out a bit more?

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  1. How would it work?
  2. What kind of integration, exactly?
  3. How can we make things lightweight so you can quickly add notes, perhaps without having to open a notebook?
  4. Is this even a good idea?

One of my favorite microblogs are Simon Willison’s TILs https://til.simonwillison.net/

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2

Okay, I’ve been wrapping my head on this since you first mentioned this idea to me and it’s growing and stirring.

From my personal framework, here’s how I’ve been operating:

  1. Test something out I’m working on
  2. Realize it’s useful, write a small isolated version in a Colab notebook
  3. Copy/Paste over to https://carbon.now.sh and send a tweet on it.

I love this idea of “scratch notebooks” that you just write in and it doesn’t get saved unless you decide it’s useful. It’s why I stay in colab for so long.

If I were to write out how I’d imagine it going in a cell, something like:

# topic python {potential_specific_page_thingy}
# export_carbon {configA} {configB}
import importlib
def is_mylib_available():
  return importlib.util.find_spec('mylib') is not None

You could then surround any documentation etc you want in markdown (maybe add another special tag in there to use), and then it gets converted, shoving it into a .py (with the markdown comments in the code!) + a documentation page, and finally a new clean notebook from your result.

Afterwards the “sandbox” notebook gets wiped for you to use again.

export_carbon in this case would make use of the carbon-now-cli to turn the snippet into a pretty picture for you to upload to twitter.

The key bits that are important for me to be able to use it:

  1. It has to be quick, from both starting and finishing
  2. Ideally it should have the concept of the scratchpad. This removes our “UntitledNotebook24.ipynb”
  3. If the topic is the same/subtopic then merge them together into a single notebook, organized by date.

Those are my immediate thoughts, open to any opinions on it but that’s how I’d probably want to use such a framework :slight_smile:

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