I recently finished my first "in anger" project with an Observable notebook. This involved learning Observable Plot, Arquero, relearning bits of Javascript, and integrating it with a Rust based simulator that's my data generation process.
It's honestly been really wonderful. Learning all of those tools has taken some significant energy, and I'm missing some functionality I'd love around parameterizing my data generator, but the final notebook is beautiful and functional.
Using markdown and reactivity makes notebooks like this actually feel usable. Jupyter's custom format made version control a giant pain and without reactivity your iteratively designed notebook easily becomes a write-only, stateful mess. I've also tried making this work using Quarto and their Observable integration and it was hacky and piecemeal.
Genuinely, this was the first time I've been pleasantly surprised and excited to write a notebook and share it with others. I'm sure there will be more sharp edges, but it's become my first choice notebook tool after this project.
For those looking for an alternative to Quarto, check out the recently released Living Papers for authoring reactive/static documents from a single source:
It's honestly been really wonderful. Learning all of those tools has taken some significant energy, and I'm missing some functionality I'd love around parameterizing my data generator, but the final notebook is beautiful and functional.
Using markdown and reactivity makes notebooks like this actually feel usable. Jupyter's custom format made version control a giant pain and without reactivity your iteratively designed notebook easily becomes a write-only, stateful mess. I've also tried making this work using Quarto and their Observable integration and it was hacky and piecemeal.
Genuinely, this was the first time I've been pleasantly surprised and excited to write a notebook and share it with others. I'm sure there will be more sharp edges, but it's become my first choice notebook tool after this project.