Jupyter Blog - Tim Head

The JupyterHub and Binder Contributor in Residence!

2019-11-26T19:52:00+00:00

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Project Jupyter are teaming up to pilot a new role in the Jupyter community: the JupyterHub Contributor in Residence

Thanks to funding from the CZI Essential Open Source Software for Science initiative we are welcoming Georgiana Elena as our first Contributor in Residence!

Managing a codebase that spans many repositories and sub-projects as well as operating mybinder.org is a significant effort. Over time we have identified a need for dedicated support to ensure that activity and communication within these repositories is efficient and productive. Driven by this need and inspired by the Django Fellowship model, we shaped the idea of a JupyterHub/Binder Contributor in Residence (CIR).

Thanks to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a Contributor in Residence within the community is now possible. Starting this year, CZI launched the Essential Open Source Software for Science grant program. It is aimed at helping open source communities that make up the core foundation of the scientific stack. We applaud CZI in providing support for core infrastructure across the sciences, and we’re honored to be part of CZI’s vision of funding maintenance, growth, development, and community engagement for open-source projects.

In this post we’ll introduce the community to our first Contributor in Residence (Georgiana) and her mentor (Tim)! The rest of this post is in the form of a conversation between Georgiana and Tim. We hope you enjoy it and that it let’s you get to know the team a bit better.

Tim: Hello Georgiana. Congrats on becoming the inaugural CIR. We’ve been lucky to have you already as a contributor on JupyterHub especially your work adding support for using Traefik as a proxy.
Geo: Hey Tim! Thank you, it’s been a really amazing experience to work on JupyterHub. I’m really excited for this next year’s journey.
Tim: You are the very first Contributor in Residence. Can you explain a little what this means?
Geo: The CIR role is about helping make the little things around the projects be amazing. Little things like answering newly opened issues, guide people towards the right place for discussion, improve bits of documentation or code, helping with releases, give people the right tools to make great contributions. And I have a great team of existing contributors to work with.
Tim: That’s right! My role in all this is to be a mentor and guide. JupyterHub and Binder have a small team that does a good job looking after the main repositories, but the universe of JupyterHub and Binder repositories is huge. So sometimes things get overlooked or missed. For example Pull Requests or Issues in one of the less-popular repositories can go for a long time without getting attention. This may hold up progress somewhere else, and people have a bad experience contributing to the project.
Geo: Hopefully we can improve on this a bit so that more people have a great experience when contributing.

Tim: Let’s find out a bit more about you. What did you do before getting involved with JupyterHub?
Geo: I studied computer science in Bucharest spending the last semester developing my bachelor’s project as an Erasmus exchange student in Madrid. During summers I worked in the industry, doing a few internships abroad. I tried to gain as much practical experience as possible, to get in touch with different people and cultures, and interning seemed like the right move.
Tim: How did you get involved with JupyterHub?
Geo: I got involved with JupyterHub thanks to the amazing Outreachy community. The Outreachy program introduced me to the world of opensource and guided me through my first steps. I now feel very lucky to have applied for the Outreachy internship at the same time that JupyterHub came up with two amazing projects. I chose JupyterHub because I “clicked” with the TraefikProxy project and I was happy to find a very welcoming community that made contributing a very pleasant and not at all a scary experience.
Tim: Have you turned into someone who spends all their time contributing or do you still have other hobbies?
Georgiana: Because I currently live in the busiest/loudest city of Romania, I love to escape it at the end of the week and spend some time in nature. My favorite place to be is the village I grew up in, where I recharge my batteries walking my dogs and cooking with my mother and sister. I like painting and photography and sometimes I do both using the photos I take as an inspiration for my paintings.

Tim: Moving on to the things you will be doing as CIR, have you already picked out something to get started with?
Geo: At first, I will be focusing on trying to get an overview of what issues are feature requests, support questions and which have been solved already. I will also spend some time getting familiar with more of the JH/Binder projects. And what better way to learn about a project than to try and use it, and to be a first time contributor.
Tim: If you had to name the top three goals you hope to achieve while being contributor in residence, what would those be?
Geo: From the perspective of someone with still a lot to learn and figure out, I would be extremely happy if during this year I will grow to be the CIR this community needs. I would love to help improve the contributing experience, increase the overall productivity of the projects and become a better contributor myself.

Tim: How can people interact with you?
Geo: People can use the usual community communication channels, GitHub, Gitter and Discourse to provide feedback or ask questions and I’ll do my best to help out.
Tim: Now that we have a CIR, do people still need to contribute to the projects?
Geo: Definitely! People are always welcome to contribute. The CIR role wasn’t created to replace anything, but to be an extra pair of hands helping the daily activities around the community become more efficient.
Tim: How can people stay engaged with the CIR program or the broader JupyterHub community moving forward?
Geo: As the CIR, I am a team member just like anyone else, and the best way to stay connected is to connect is through our team channels — we have team discussions in the Jupyter Community Forum, and team information in the JupyterHub Team Compass repository (including monthly team meetings that anyone is welcome to join).

BinderHub is out of Beta!

2019-04-26T16:49:00+00:00

Nearly two years ago, the Binder Project released the beta version
of BinderHub, the technology behind mybinder.org. Since then, mybinder.org has grown to serve nearly 90,000 launches each week and hit the two million launches in a year milestone last year. Over these two years BinderHub has matured as technology and community. Several new organizations now run their own BinderHubs and have joined the community of maintainers.

A year of Binder sessions served from mybinder.org. Darker colors show users in countries that have launched more Binder sessions. The pins show the approximate locations of public BinderHubs that we know of. Where is mybinder.org? It is a global effort so there is no one location associated with it or the team that runs it.

Today we are proud to announce that we’ve removed the “beta” label from all pages served by BinderHub. BinderHub is now a tool with a track record of working well in production (both at mybinder.org and in other deployments), its general features and API have stabilized, and JupyterHub, the underlying technology that BinderHub uses, is close to its 1.0 release.

A big thank you to all those who have used, commented, advocated, advertised, contributed, maintained and funded this journey. The deployment at mybinder.org is funded with grants from the Moore Foundation and the Google Cloud Platform.

Who else has deployed a BinderHub?

A goal of Project Binder is to build modular, open-source tools that
others can deploy for their own communities. BinderHub, the core technology behind mybinder.org, runs on Kubernetes this means it can be deployed on many cloud providers or even on your own hardware. Over the years, we have seen many new organizations deploy their own BinderHubs. Here are our highlights of other organizations who have joined the BinderHub community.

GESIS were the first to deploy a public BinderHub that is operated independently of mybinder.org. The GESIS BinderHub instance went live
in December 2017 and has been running ever since. They are frequent
contributors to the upstream project. Their BinderHub runs on a bare metal
Kubernetes cluster.

The Pangeo Project instance was the next to come online, launching their
public BinderHub instance in September 2018 (more details in their blog post). They provide additional compute resources and have customized their setup to provide on-demand dask clusters to users. Try out one
of their examples using ocean data. The Pangeo cluster is hosted on Google Kubernetes Engine.

Recently, the Turing Way project has been working on deploying a BinderHub at the Turing Institute in the UK. This BinderHub will serve both internal and external users with the goal of making it easier to share data science projects. They have run several workshops including one that teaches scientists and research software engineers how to deploy their own BinderHub instance. Recently they led a workshop in which ten academics and IT staff deployed their own BinderHub on the Microsoft Azure cloud! Sarah Gibson from their team has recently joined the team that operates mybinder.org.

Finally, the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS) runs a service called Syzygy. It deploys several JupyterHubs and BinderHubs for scientific organizations around Canada. A Binder team recently held a tutorial on deploying Binder and JupyterHub at the PEARC (you can find slides for the talk here). They have also provided a script for deploying JupyterHub (and Binder) on Terraform.

What’s next?

Now that BinderHub is not in beta anymore, what is next? As Project Binder we will focus on adoption, training, and growing the Binder community. This means growing the creation of Binder-ready repositories (repositories that have the necessary structure for Binder to create the environment needed to run the repository’s code). We will increase our outreach and marketing efforts to make sure a diverse audience everywhere around the world knows about Binder.

We will also work on making it easier to setup and operate a public BinderHub no matter what cloud vendor you are using. We are excited to see more organizations deploy their own BinderHubs for their communities. In the coming months, our goal is to create a federation of public BinderHubs
that operate in unison to serve the global user base of mybinder.org.

If this caught your attention consider joining the Binder community, or contributing to Project Binder! A good place to start is the Jupyter Community Forum or dive straight into the code on GitHub.

MyBinder.org serves two million launches

2018-11-13T12:35:00+00:00

by the Binder Team

Since the beginning of 2018, the Binder community has been hosting a BinderHub at https://mybinder.org as a free public service. Today, we are proud to announce that this hub has served over two million Binders. To mark this milestone we would like to say a huge Thank You! to the large community of people who use, build, and fund the project. Without you this important public infrastructure would not be the user-friendly, reliable, well-supported and documented resource that we enjoy today. mybinder.org has enabled people from almost every country in the world to learn, participate and share countless projects, ideas and stories. Here’s to two million more!

A huge thank you to all those who help with building, using, and operating https://mybinder.org.

What is mybinder.org?

mybinder.org let’s you take a repository full of Jupyter notebooks or RMarkdown and turn it into a collection of interactive notebooks. You can share your work with anyone by sending them a simple link (like this one). All they have to do is open the link in a web browser and they can run those notebooks from anywhere in the world without having to install anything.

Who is using mybinder.org?

Currently about 70–80,000 Binders are launched every week. A lot of those are people who are looking for a quick and easy way to launch a Python or RStudio environment. However in the last week a notebook showing off fifty ways to solve Fizz Buzz has been getting a lot of love. Beyond those heavy hitters and short-lived audience favorites there is a long tail of over 400 unique repositories that get launched every week. It would take the rest of the post to list them all!

One last statistic that we are particularly proud of: over the last 80 days we have had users from almost all around the globe! Binder was started as a way to make computational research easier to share and reuse. We have been amazed at how many people around the world have used Binder for teaching classes, reproducing results, sharing interactive analyses, and making their work more accessible to others. We are particularly proud that this includes people from around the entire world.

Countries from which https://mybinder.org has received visitors between 22 August 2018 and 10 November 2018.

Data set of all launches on mybinder.org

mybinder.org is operated as a public infrastructure that is transparent, open, and inclusive. We chat, discuss, and work in the open. This is why we are now publishing a new data set: a continuously updated log of every launch that happens on mybinder.org!

MyBinder.org Events Archive

We would love to see people explore this data set as a public resource that describes the kinds of repositories being shared and launched on the public mybinder.org deployment.

A new badge!

One more thing … we thought now is a good time to give the trusty “Launch Binder” badge an overhaul. To improve the badge we put together some suggestions, reached out to the community, and within a few days received a lot of feedback and new ideas. After combining all the inputs, our new badge went live earlier this week. We present to you our new badge:

The new “Launch Binder” badge. Binder blue instead of bright red!

We hope you like it as much as we do. If you are in love with the old design or not quite ready to switch yet, do not worry! The old badge is not going anywhere. If you are using the old badge in your README it will continue to look the same as it always has.

If you do want to change a previously generated link to the new badge, edit the name of the SVG in the link from the old:

[![Binder](http://mybinder.org/badge.svg)](http://mybinder.org/v2/gh/binder-examples/r/master)

to the new:

[![Binder](http://mybinder.org/badge_logo.svg)](http://mybinder.org/v2/gh/binder-examples/r/master)Outro.

Open infrastructure in the cloud

The Binder project is a community-driven experiment in radically-open infrastructure. BinderHub, the underlying technology that powers a Binder deployment, is an open project and can be deployed in many other cloud environments. For example, see the Pangeo Binder deployment for geospatial analytics, or the Gesis Binder deployment for social sciences. We are excited to see the project head in new directions as we continue to grow the technology and the community around Binder.

Finally, we could not have done any of this without a ton of support from the Binder community. First, many thanks to the Moore Foundation for funding initial development of Binder’s underlying tech, and for helping us finance running the deployment at mybinder.org. Second, many thanks to the Binder project core team for fostering excellent technology and a great community. Finally, thanks to everybody in the Binder community — whether you’ve launched repositories, shared your Binders, participated in discussions, built features, helped design this post’s banner image (❤), or gave us some critical feedback. Binder’s purpose is to serve the community, and you all have made it so worth it!

If you’d like to get involved in the Binder project, here are a few helpful links:

To learn about Binder, see the Binder documentation: docs.mybinder.org
For information on how to deploy your own BinderHub, see the BinderHub deployment docs: binderhub.readthedocs.io
To participate in conversations with the Binder community, say hello on the Binder gitter channel (https://gitter.im/jupyterhub/binder) or the JupyterHub/Binder Discourse forum (discourse.jupyter.org).
If you’d like to see the code itself, see the three main open projects that make up a Binder deployment: BinderHub (github.com/jupyterhub/binderhub), repo2docker (github.com/jupyter/repo2docker), and JupyterHub (github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub)