Breakout idea - more Binder practice (and understanding Binder with RStudio?)

[dmgt]

• Summary:

  • I saw there's already a Binder workshop + lecture on the schedule and am interested in more coworking/troubleshooting time to work on binderizing (sp?) our own repos since I'm a Binder novice and my team has some code we'd really like to be able to binderize!.

  • In order of perceived increasing difficulty (to me), my long term goal to be able to do, and then teach others how to:

    • set up the simplest Binder possible
    • set up a Jupyter notebook with an R kernel in a Binder (work with many R users)
    • set up RStudio in a Binder, as seen in this recent paper

• Types of support needed:

  • input from people more familiar with Binder or wanting to learn together
  • space at a breakout session?
  • could set up an etherpad or slack channel for binder-specific q's
  • If there's anything I can do to support this logistically, happy to help

• Contact:

  • github: dmgt
  • carpentries slack: dana
  • twitter: @dmgt

[ha0ye]

Am also a Binder novice and want to learn. This was a good reminder to ping @betatim for his workshop materials.

[betatim]

Workshop materials are still pretty none existent outside people's heads. They will materialise in https://github.com/Build-a-binder/build-a-binder.github.io/ by 17 July though, at least a first version. It would be great to try and share/create them together. Especially because for me it is tricky to know what others struggle with. I only see the few who appear in our gitter channel, but I assume there are a lot more.

[ha0ye]

Thanks @betatim

Sounds like we'll take a first crack this weekend and should plan on writing up some feedback as an issue in that repo, then.

[dmgt]

@ha0ye There is a detailed Binder diagram in the Binder docs here.

If helpful I am happy to share (and improve on) these slides I made for a demo for an interested prof who had no prior familiarity with Jupyter

[betatim]

Did you end up creating any new slides, docs or examples? Even a list of things people new to binder find hard to understand would already be super useful.

[ha0ye]

The things that came up are:

1. A short readme for how binder works - what computer is it running on, who’s paying for it, etc.
2. Tutorial workflows for setting up a basic binder for Jupyter, RStudio, etc.

EDIT: Here's a new example - I did make a fork of @beecycles's repo with some changes to get an RStudio link: https://github.com/ha0ye/Power_of_Irma

[dmgt]

Links to what we wrote so far:

• Breakout session doc with links to resources and expanded list of questions
• Rough draft of documentation for creating a Binder for the first time (goal is to add the screenshots and get it on GitHub) @crazyhottommy @repositorian

EDIT: Also this example to show interactive publications

[crazyhottommy]

thanks @dmgt If you put it on github, I can keep contributing :)

[dmgt]

@crazyhottommy @ha0ye Here's an updated version on github. Feedback to improve it would be great, am also happy for it to be forked elsewhere.

[crazyhottommy]

Thanks @dmgt Dana! I will fork it.

[betatim]

Just started putting together some tutorial material for the build-a-binder workshop. Current state is here: https://github.com/Build-a-binder/build-a-binder.github.io/blob/master/workshop/10-zero-to-binder.md

[dmgt]

@ha0ye I can (belatedly) share the resources from the recent Birmingham binder event and our updated notes from CarpentryConnect Davis with folks from the breakout session not in this thread

@betatim I've read through the build-a-binder issues - before your next workshops are there specific parts of the docs you'd like people to try out or draft additional notes/examples etc for if that'd be useful and there are folks from CarpentryConnect who are interested?

[betatim]

Right now I don't have a concrete idea.

If you look at the two guides in https://github.com/Build-a-binder/build-a-binder.github.io/tree/master/workshop and the timeline.md where would you go next after zero-to-binder and -repo2docker-walkthrough in terms of exercises?

Maybe the next exercise should cover some of the popular questions https://hackmd.io/6ehrJIKqRSK0pIV_OUoL9Q# and https://hackmd.io/SGRP3O3CSoOORDDQfpMlow?both?

[ha0ye]

I think a collection of examples to cover some of the questions on what to use Binder for and implementation details.

@betatim I have an R package that uses Binder (https://github.com/ha0ye/rEDM). All the relevant binder files are in /binder, so this should be easier to see what to do. (and I've added info in @dmgt's binder_tutorial repo https://github.com/dmgt/binder_tutorial)

[betatim]

What does your postInstall do? I clearly don't R enough :)

If it is something generally useful to R users maybe we should add it to https://github.com/binder-examples/r or mention it there?

[ha0ye]

Since the repo contains the files for the R package, it can’t be installed from the MRAN repository (as with the other packages in install.R). So after the package dependencies are installed, postBuild installs the package from the repo files.

It might be useful to add it as a note somewhere. I think the R users who are most interested in binder will be more likely to have R packages to demo or R research compendia that are constructed as R packages.

[betatim]

Do you want to open a PR to the examples repository and amend the repo2docker documentation?

[ha0ye]

someday...