I’m pretty new to all of this (Python, Notebooks, data science, etc), but not new to programming. I am excited about nbdev, and have a question about the recommended testing workflow.
In Jeremy’s YouTube video, “I Like Notebooks”, he recommends writing notebooks in sucjh a way that you can frequently restart the kernel and hit “Run All”.
The NBDev documentation makes the point that writing tests in the same notebook as the code is valuable. Generally I agree. However, I frequently find myself writing some pretty heavy tests that rely upon external services. So if I were to hit “Run All” in that notebook, those long-running cells would also run, but that’s not what I want. I could tag these cells as “#slow” and that would affect whether nbtest runs them, and that’s fine. But that wouldn’t help me prevent them from running when I click run all at the top of the notebook.
So these two guidelines make me think that what I really want is the ability to skip certain cells by default when hitting run all in Jupyter, and tag them such that they only run at nbdev_test time.
But in searching for guidance about how to exclude notebook cells from running by default, many folks advise against this for various reasons, so I think I’m swimming upstream with that idea.
This all leads me to think that I should be moving these longer-running tests into a notebook outside of the notebook where the code is, and then I start to think I’m losing one of the core advantages of nbdev.
I think I’m overcomplicating this. What are you clever folks doing?
