Tutorial Feedback from PyCon US

[jcrist]

Participant feedback

• Introduce joins better and before we first use them
• Maybe improve join documentation in ibis itself
• Add mapping to Table.rename docstring
• Don't use jupyterlab, just use codespaces directly
• More ibis context at the beginning
  • Why ibis?
  • Ibis is opensource
  • How to install
  • Where does ibis sit in the space of tools
    • How does it differ from other tools like sqlalchemy
  • What pain points does it solve?

Our Feedback

• Design slides/intro better to cover setup issues/late arrivals
  so by the time we start executing things everyone should be
  ready.
• Maybe move to using postgres for notebook 1 instead of
  duckdb to better differentiate client & backend architecture.
• Hammer more on how performant duckdb is
• Notebook 1 also shows to_* methods, maybe want to diminish
  that there in favor of notebook 2.
• Introduction of _ in notebook 2 feels a bit off. It works, but
  it's distracting.
  • Maybe add at the end of notebook 1 after doing a complex
    compound expression (motivation) to close out section on
    expressions.
• Perhaps we want to redesign notebook 2 to be more about data
  import/export rather than "python ecosystem" things? Could talk
  more here about the ibis.read_* methods as well as
  create_table maybe.
• Notebook 3 still downloads the data when that's already done in
  notebook 0.
• Notebook 0 all downloads should be scripted so they don't need
  to repeat once they've been done.
• Better mix exercises in notebook 1
• Don't use %load for solutions, instead make use of html
  summary/detail tags to do dropdowns in a markdown box.
• Better contrast on slides (no darkmode for projectors)
• At end of notebook 1 it might be good to poke around live at tab
  completion/existence of other methods on ibis.Table
  • Maybe have an exercise where they poke around and try a
    method we didn't talk about?
• Add more "optional extras" to exercises to better occupy speedy
  students.

[cpcloud]

After trying in vain to get details/summary tags to work, they just show up as comments in the rendered notebook.

I say we give up on that for now.