2025-09-26 –, Apollo
For well over a decade, Python notebooks revolutionized our field. They gave us so much creative freedom and dramatically lowered the entry barrier for newcomers. Yet despite all this ... it has been a decade! And the notebook is still in roughly the same form factor.
So what if we allow ourselves to rethink notebooks ... really rethink it! What features might we come up with? Can we make the notebook understand datasources? What about LLMs? Can we generate widgets on the fly? What if we make changes to Python itself?
This presentation will be a stream of demos that help paint a picture of what the future might hold. I will share my latest work in the anywidget/marimo ecosystem as well as some new hardware integrations.
The main theme that I will work towards: if you want better notebooks, reactive Python might very well be the future.
There are going to be many demos in this talk that will highlight what happens if we force Python to behave reactively instead of imperatively.
- Some of these demos will show notebooks widgets that help you play with your data by merging javascript/Python interaction.
- Others will focus on how notebooks can be made self reproducible by supporting UV/pytest directly in the notebook itself.
- But we will also explore how LLMs fit into the bigger picture, especially when you're interested to work with data. Want to zero-shot an interactive notebook around your data? Then it helps if the datasources automatically provide schemas.
- Oh, and another fun thing, thanks to WASM you technically won't even need a local Python environment anymore for any of the things that I am talking about. I will demonstrate that too!
Vincent is a senior data professional who worked as an engineer, researcher, team lead, and educator in the past. You might know him from tech talks with an attempt to defend common sense over hype in data science. He is especially interested in understanding algorithmic systems so that one may prevent failure. As such, there has always been a preference for simpler solutions that scale, as opposed to the latest and greatest from the tech industry.
Vincent is also well known for creating a lot of open-source packages, some of which have been downloaded over a million times. He's also well known for his calmcode.io project, as well his blog over at koaning.io.