Becoming the new JupyterHub and Jupyter Book community manager
There are moments in life when things, simply, converge. You work and study, study and work, and then, simply, it happens. It starts one day when somebody tells you “there is this new thing called Jupyter Notebook, you should give it a try!”. So you install it, play around with it. It works like a charm. It’s easy, fast, nearly playful. It’s beautiful–and if you grow up in Italy, beauty always matters. Then, you have the urge to tell others about it. You organize a workshop at a conference in musculoskeletal image analysis and introduce marvelous novel tools for computational research: “You know? Nowadays we can do open science easily because somebody has created Jupyter Notebook, Binder, new Python libraries!” And then, together with some friends, you write a proposal for a Jupyter Community Workshop, and–unbelievable!–you get it. Initially, you think you are just organizing a workshop. But somehow, the number of people interested becomes larger and larger, and you find yourself co-founding and coordinating what is now the Open and Reproducible Musculoskeletal Imaging Research (ORMIR) Community. In ORMIR’s Python packages, the examples are in Jupyter Notebook, the documentation is in Jupyter Book. Sooner or later, we will have our JupyterHubs too; it’s just a matter of time. In parallel, life gives you some professional challenges. So you start teaching Python online, one-to-one. You look for material that fits your style, but you cannot find any. So you start teaching it your way, using Jupyter Notebook in JupyterLab and it works. Students find it easy, independent of their background. The teaching material seems to work, so you transcribe it into a book entitled Learn Python with Jupyter, and you make it open. At the same time, you are obsessed with keeping up to date. You go to JupyterCon, meet the people, watch their YouTube videos, participate in online meetings. And then, there is a job posting for a community manager. And you are like: “Nah, they will never hire me”, so you set it aside. But then somebody out of the blue tells you to apply because “100% of lottery winners played!”. So you give it a chance, and here I am: my name is Serena Bonaretti and I am the new JupyterHub and Jupyter Book community manager!
In this new role, I am very much looking forward to working with the JupyterHub and Jupyter Book communities! I will collaborate with maintainers to understand and document projects’ priorities and define the best processes to achieve their vision. I will support contributors in finding their way into the projects and make the real-world impact that they hope to achieve. I will dialogue with users to make sure that the tools we create are useful for their work. And I will share our activities monthly and what we learn with anybody interested, so that we can all benefit from this journey!
And you? How did you start using the tools of the Jupyter ecosystem? Do you work in JupyterHub? Have you ever written a Jupyter Book? Would you like to be a contributor? Are you an enthusiastic user? Write me on Discord (Jupyter Book/MyST) or Zulip (JupyterHub). The JupyterHub and Jupyter Book communities and I are looking forward to getting to know you!
