Old timer at the hackerspace told me to ditch Jupyter notebooks

Guy named Pete, been coding since the 80s. He said Jupyter is for showing off not building. I ignored him for a year. Then my ML pipeline kept breaking on deployment. Switched to .py scripts with modular functions. Took me 3 weeks to refactor everything but now it actually runs in production. Anyone else get called out for using notebooks?

2 comments

2 Comments

nora7354d ago

Pete at my first job told me the same thing back in 2018. He watched me spend two days debugging a notebook just to find out I had cells running out of order. Switched to .py files with functions and never looked back. One huge tip - use argparse for your parameters instead of hardcoding them in cells. Also learned the hard way that notebooks lie about state. You think a variable is set but really it's from a cell you ran three hours ago.

james_butler4d ago

wait wait wait, @nora735 two DAYS debugging a notebook because cells ran out of order? lmaoo i would have lost my mind. that's brutal. i did something similar once where i accidentally ran a cell that redefined a variable and spent hours wondering why my plot looked like garbage. notebooks are such liars man, i swear they have a secret life.