Regular Online Tutorials

[mrocklin]

As a community service we could offer online tutorials hosted by one of the Dask maintainers.

The tutorial at https://tutorial.dask.org was designed to run in a three-to-four hour period (for SciPy). We could offer this, or some stripped down version of it as an online web video call. Hopefully it's relatively straightforward to deliver, and also a good learning experience for those involved in giving it.

My hope is that as more of us deliver this tutorial we then are able to refine and improve the tutorial over time. Preparing, delivering, and then tuning the tutorial afterwards would, I think, be a high value maintenance activity. I think that we may have the bandwidth to start delivering the tutorial somewhat regularly.

[jacobtomlinson]

We could try using Twitch and/or YouTube streaming for this, that way they can be archived afterwards and watched back later. Many conferences that have moved online are using these services and it seems to work quite well.

I've been experimenting this week with streaming bits of my open source maintenance work on Twitch and it was pretty easy to get started.

[TomAugspurger]

This sounds fun. One question around infrastructure & format though: do you envision attendees following along live and running the examples, asking questions, etc.? In the past we've temporarily set up a cluster with jupyterhub & Dask so that attendees could play with a real cluster. Would we attempt the same thing here, or would we just have attendees run things locally? My only concern is around who would pay for the cluster computing resources. I'm not too worried about the technical side of things. It's pretty easy to set up a Jupyterhub & Dask Gateway on a kubernetes cluster these days. Tom

…

On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 4:18 AM Jacob Tomlinson ***@***.***> wrote: We could try using Twitch and/or YouTube streaming for this, that way they can be archived afterwards and watched back later. Many conferences that have moved online are using these services and it seems to work quite well. I've been experimenting this week with streaming bits of my open source maintenance work on Twitch and it was pretty easy to get started. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#57 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAKAOIUNTKJ62G3V3XOG4FTRSY7MTANCNFSM4NG6DARQ> .

[mrocklin]

It seems like there are two approaches to video tutorials

1. Broadcast with twitch/youtube
2. Video conference

I think that they're both useful. It seems like twitch/youtube support more viewers, but don't allow for as much engagement. My guess is that they're better if we're doing new content every time. Video conferencing might be better if we have smaller groups (say 10-20) where the students are going through exercises on their own and being coached by community members. This seems better to me if we do the standard tutorial on a regular basis.

My only concern is around who would pay for the cluster computing
resources

I think that the Dask/NumFOCUS account could be used if we're looking at something in the few hundred dollars range.

[jcrist]

In the past we've temporarily set up a cluster with jupyterhub & Dask so
that attendees could play with a real cluster. Would we attempt the same
thing here, or would we just have attendees run things locally?

I recently gave the tutorial using the binder setup at tutorial.dask.org, and found it good enough to teach people how dask works and how to think about it. Yes, they didn't get a real "distributed" cluster, but they still got to see how dask's api works and learned how to reason about the various concepts.

[jacobtomlinson]

@mrocklin yeah I agree with that assessment. I think Twitch/YouTube would be good for doing something like a talk. Especially if the recording would be useful afterwards. But then video conference would be good for a more workshop style session.

[mrocklin]

If we have human resources, I'm inclined to try both and see what engages people.

If I were to organize this I would suggest the following:

1. We schedule two online tutorials, one for two weeks from now and one for two weeks following. We get suckers volunteers to sign up to deliver these.
2. On alternating weeks we also get a couple of people to sign up to give a Twitch-style talks about some topic like "all the ways to deploy Dask on Kubernetes" or "How to use Dask with Xarray"

[TomAugspurger]

I'll volunteer for the second round :)

…

On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 11:32 AM Matthew Rocklin ***@***.***> wrote: If we have human resources, I'm inclined to try both and see what engages people. If I were to organize this I would suggest the following: 1. We schedule two online tutorials, one for two weeks from now and one for two weeks following. We get suckers volunteers to sign up to deliver these. 2. On alternating weeks we also get a couple of people to sign up to give a Twitch-style talks about some topic like "all the ways to deploy Dask on Kubernetes" or "How to use Dask with Xarray" — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#57 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAKAOITRC2VBAXE2B3HDGVLRS2SIBANCNFSM4NG6DARQ> .

[jacobtomlinson]

Happy to be a sucker, although I would like to rotate off Czar duties before that time so that I can spend that time preparing.

[mrocklin]

If your Czar duties are tracking dask/distributed then I'm happy to do extra work to allow you to go be a sucker on this one :) I'm excited to see if this is something that we can start doing regularly.

…

On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 5:42 AM Jacob Tomlinson ***@***.***> wrote: Happy to be a sucker, although I would like to rotate off Czar duties before that time so that I can spend that time preparing. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#57 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AACKZTDZ5E2ZG4X53L5WVM3RTUDB3ANCNFSM4NG6DARQ> .

[jacobtomlinson]

Ok sounds good.

two weeks from now

From when you sent that message that would be Friday the 5th of June.

Do you have thoughts on a time? I wonder whether we should try and do it at a time like 2pm, which would be practical for folks in immediately neighbouring timezones. Perhaps trying to alternate the presenter between continents week-to-week to be as inclusive as possible.

[martindurant]

Happy to help out too

[mrocklin]

I think that we'll want at least a weak of lead time to advertise and prep. +1 on switching around time zone availability to support a broad set of attendees.

[jacobtomlinson]

Ok given that time is passing I suggest we go for Friday June 12th at 1pm UTC. That'll be 9am east coast US, 2pm for me and 3pm central Europe, so should have good coverage. I also suggest we pencil in 90 minutes for it.

Then maybe next time someone in North America could run it to get coverage for west coast?

I think we should also use Zoom for this first one. Do we have access to a Zoom pro account for avoiding the time limit and doing recordings?

@mrocklin are you able to coordinate promoting it?

[mrocklin]

I think we should also use Zoom for this first one. Do we have access to a Zoom pro account for avoiding the time limit and doing recordings?

Yes, through NumFOCUS. I've sent you and support@numfocus an e-mail

@mrocklin are you able to coordinate promoting it?

Definitely. The obvious things to do is tweet it. I can see if there are a couple of other channels.

[dgerlanc]

I taught a 4-hour workshop on oreilly.com focused on Dask Dataframes and teaching it again at the end of July. It alternates between lecture/exercise. May be up for doing a volunteer teaching session or integrating these into the docs. Here's a link to the notebooks: https://github.com/dgerlanc/dask-scaling-dataframe.