2020-07-29 –, BoF
This Birds of Feather session aims to facilitate structured discussion around some of the themes that arose from the mybinder.org user survey (https://mybinder.org). Specifically, which features or improvements would the Julia community like the Project Binder team (https://jupyter.org/binder) to pursue, what roadblocks do they foresee, and what "on ramps" are available for community members to become involved in the development and implementation processes.
The Binder Project is a collection of tools that rewards best practices in reproducible data science and provides an easy method of sharing computing environments with anyone via a single clickable link. The free and public Binder service, hosted at https://mybinder.org, serves around 100,000 launches per week from over 10,000 individual git repositories in a variety of programming languages, including Julia.
Binder is a community-driven project, taking the lead from community-developed standards of reproducibility and input from its users via the mybinder.org user survey. The user survey was last conducted at the beginning of 2020 and a summary of the results, both general and specific to the Julia community, will be presented.
There are so many fantastic ideas and features the Binder project team (https://jupyterhub-team-compass.readthedocs.io/en/latest/team.html#binder-team) would like to develop but - like many open source projects - we face time restrictions, a low bus factor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor), and often lack domain expertise when developing language-specific features.
Sarah Gibson would like to introduce the Binder Project to the Julia community as an opportunity to shape a tool that would be most useful to them and provide guidance on how to get started with contributing to or joining the project.
Sarah Gibson is a Research Software Engineer at the Alan Turing Institute. She is passionate about best software practices and reproducible research and helps the open source community reach these gold-standards by contributing to The Turing Way (https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way) and operating mybinder.org (https://jupyter.org/binder)