11-02, 16:05–16:45 (America/New_York), Music Box (Room 5411)
Have you experienced the frustration of installing a new Python package, only to discover that your existing code and Jupyter notebooks no longer function as expected? Have you found yourself uttering the phrase, "It works on my computer," to a colleague? Have you ever looked at Randal Munroe's five-year-old XKCD comic on Python environments (https://xkcd.com/1987/) and felt torn between laughter and despair?
Well, there's hope on the horizon. In this presentation, we will delve into an open-source tool that enables the creation and management of a set of stable, reproducible, and version-controlled environments right on your laptop, all through an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI).
It's no secret that the state of Python packaging is far from ideal. The challenges in having a coherent experience stem from historical, social, and technical factors. While there are dedicated individuals working to propel the ecosystem forward (see https://pypackaging-native.github.io for some of the issues), that is all in the future. What can you do right now to maintain your sanity and focus on your actual work?
The good news is that there are established best practices and tools that can already offer you a relatively smooth experience in managing your local Python environments. The catch is that discovering these best practices, mastering the tools, and consistently implementing them over time can be quite daunting, especially when you're a busy developer, scientist, or analyst striving to accomplish your tasks.
Our perspective is that you shouldn't have to be burdened with these concerns. In this presentation, we introduce a new desktop version of conda-store. conda-store seamlessly incorporates best-practice workflows behind the scenes while offering you a user-friendly, intuitive interface for managing your Python environments. We cover what conda-store does under the hood and how you can use it to restore your love of Python (https://xkcd.com/353/).
conda-store has been under development for three years in the context of cloud data science platforms and is now an official Conda Incubator project. The new desktop version supports Windows, OS X and Linux.
No previous knowledge expected
Dharhas Pothina is the CTO at Quansight where he helps clients wrangle their data using the pydata stack. He leads the development teams for the Nebari, Conda-Store and Ragna open source projects.
His background includes expertise in computational modeling, big data/high performance computing, visualization and geospatial analysis. Prior to his current position he worked for 15 years in state and federal research labs where he led large multi-disciplinary, multi-agency research projects.
He holds a PhD in Civil Engineering and an MS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a BTech in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
Dharhas is passionate about enabling scientists and engineers with tools that let them scale as well as share their analyses, he loves woodworking, photography and teaching his daughters to love science.