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@gnestor

Grant Nestor

gnestor
Santa Barbara, CA

I have spent the past 4 years working on open-source software projects such as Jupyter Notebook, JupyterLab, JupyterLab extensions, and Jupyter-specific Python libraries. I work primarily on front-end (Javascript, React) and I am interested primarily in improving the notebook or "interactive computing" experience. I have been able to do this work thanks to grants from the Sloan Foundation and Helmsley Trust, support from Cal Poly and UC Berkeley, and sponsorship from companies like Two Sigma, Plotly, and Quansight. As my funding has shifted from grants to corporate sponsorship, the work I am doing has shifted from core projects to company-specific solutions.

I would love to spend more time working directly on Jupyter Notebook, JupyterLab, nteract, and vdom. Specifically, I would like to work on:

  • LSP (Language Server Protocol) support in JupyterLab and other clients to allow users to have modern code intelligence in the notebook
  • "Interactive vdom" to allow users to easily create interactive widgets in the notebook

I would like to spend more time researching what I consider "the future of Jupyter and interactive computing":

  • Reactive runtimes (or "kernels") to allow greater reproducibility and higher-level programming experience
  • WASM-based runtimes (or "kernels") (ala pyodide) to allow client-side code execution for non-browser languages such as Python, R, and Julia and greatly simplified application architecture
  • Non-notebook user interfaces to allow new users to take advantage of interactive computing

I would like to see something like an open-source Notion, Coda, or Airtable that allows people to work with computing artifacts in an environment that is comfortable for everyone. Unlike the notebook, users wouldn't need to write code in order to interact with data, they could use artifacts to fetch data and interact with it. Unlike Coda, the environment and the widgets would be open-source and hackable. I would like to explore how the research topics above could fit together to improve the Jupyter user experience and create entirely new computational environments.

My goal is to humanize the experience of working with interactive and dynamic media.

Featured work

  1. jupyterlab/jupyterlab

    JupyterLab computational environment.

    TypeScript 14,197
  2. jupyter/notebook

    Jupyter Interactive Notebook

    Jupyter Notebook 11,759
  3. jupyterlab/jupyter-renderers

    Renderers and renderer extensions for JupyterLab

    HTML 490
  4. nteract/vdom

    🎄 Virtual DOM for Python

    Jupyter Notebook 222
  5. jupyterlab/jupyterlab-monaco

    A JupyterLab extension providing the Monaco editor

    TypeScript 239

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