Completed Platform Initiatives

As the leader of an organization that benefits from the broader scientific python ecosystem, I would like to find ways to contribute back on behalf of my institution. I know we benefit from capacity and smooth operations on mybinder.org, and I would like to put some money towards sustaining that. However, handling procurement and getting my institution to pay out a few hundred dollars consistently every month comes with very high overhead and not worth it. Since we have a contractual relationship with 2i2c, I would like to support mybinder.org through cloud spend through 2i2c.

As a volunteer member of the team running mybinder.org, I would like to run our infrastructure on a diverse set of cheap hosting providers. This gives us extra capacity but also resiliency, as a single provider kicking us out would not shut us down completely. Since we provide arbitrary code execution, we are prime targets for cryptominers and other forms of network abuse that hosting providers don’t like. Handling abuse reports from hosting providers is stressful, and if I knew that being kicked out (even temporarily) will not cause a full outage, I’ll be a lot less stressed.

As a student, I am expected to click links that are provided to me (through my LMS, course website, slack or other medium) that will launch a jupyter notebook pre-populated with content related to my assignment or class. This mostly works fine, and preserves any changes I make in my content, and am happy! But in some rare cases, it does not work, and throws me a scary black error box with messages about git that I don’t really understand. Usually reaching out to my TAs can fix this, but it causes me stress and lost time.

As a TA, I often have to use the JupyterHub admin interface to run git commands to fix errors faced by some students when using nbgitpuller to distribute materials. I would very much rather spend my time on helping them learn, so more automatic ways to handle errors here would save me a lot of time.

As a Jupyter Book maintainer, I want to be able to update our community-facing documentation independently from our user-facing documentation. I want those updates to be immediately available to our community members without waiting for release cycles to update. I also want to know where to go to update different kinds of documentation.

As a Jupyter Book community member and user, I want an easy-to-remember place to refer to for important community documentation. For anything with a single source of truth (e.g., an events calendar), I don’t want to have multiple versions of the same page available because it’s tied to multiple “versions” of software in ReadTheDocs.