Introducing JupyterHub’s Outreachy interns! — December 2022 Cohort
As part of the community strategic support project funded by CZI’s EOSS grant series, the JupyterHub sub-project has funding to support Outreachy interns through four cohorts over the next two years. We would like to introduce you to the first cohort and the projects they will be working on!
Ogoh Blessing Onyowoicho — Improve Accessibility in JupyterHub
Accessibility is the ability of tools (in our case web tools) to be used by a variety of communities with different disabilities. There are a variety of standards and tools for evaluating and ensuring that a web page can be used effectively by as many people as possible. Work by the Accessibility team is ongoing to define a set of standard tools to improve accessibility across the Jupyter ecosystem.
The JupyterHub project is working to improve the accessibility of its pages to ensure we are providing tools that are as useful as they can be to as many people as we can. During the internship, we will evaluate JupyterHub’s accessibility, find ways to improve it, and integrate accessibility testing into the development process, in collaboration with the Accessibility team, to ensure we do a better job going forward.
Ogoh Blessing says:
My name is Ogoh Blessing Onyowoicho. I am a self-taught Frontend developer based in Lagos, Nigeria and I am an Outreachy intern working on Improving the accessibility of JupyterHub.
I am excited to work on JupyterHub because it is giving me the opportunity to use skills that I have accrued over the years to proffer solutions to problems that affect people’s lives directly. On hearing accessibility, the first thought one has is that it involves building web products that people with special needs can use seamlessly. Though this is part of it, accessibility goes way beyond this. It involves building products that different users (e.g users at different locations, users with different devices etc) can use easily. The thought of contributing to improving the experience of so many people alone excites me.
In the coming months, I hope to learn and continue to hone my skills as I am guided by my mentors and members of the community I get to interact with.
Allan Wasega — Restructure and improve JupyterHub documentation by implementing the Diátaxis framework
JupyterHub has a range of documentation that covers both developer and user audiences in order to help them deploy, maintain, and use their own instance of a JupyterHub. The success of an open source software project to (i) be adopted by users, and (ii) receive meaningful contributions relies heavily on the quality, navigability and accessibility of documentation so that users and developers have all the information they need to achieve what they want to do.
A framework for organising technical documentation has arisen called diátaxis. It takes a systematic approach to understanding user requirements of documentation throughout the lifecycle of interaction with a product and posits that different user needs require different approaches in creation of the documentation, as well as a layout to navigate these different “modes” of documentation.
This project will focus on a refactoring of the documentation for the JupyterHub package. We will begin by performing a review of the present documentation, categorise these into the diataxis framework, and then restructure the documentation files in the repository. Once we have transformed the documentation into this framework, it will be much easier to identify missing and unclear documentation (those that were difficult to categorise). We can then begin to curate resources that can fill the gaps and improve documentation that is not specific enough.
Allan says:
I am Allan Wasega, from Nairobi, Kenya. Broadly, I like to describe myself as a researcher and a writer. Researcher because looking into things to find patterns or hidden information has always been of interest to me. Writer because I figured early on that words allow me to express myself and to communicate to a larger audience than that inside my head :). As a Computer Science student, I looked for ways to bring these two skills together within the realm of computing and that is how I found myself in the technical writing space.
As an undergraduate student, I used Jupyter Notebooks extensively for most of my programming assignments and projects. As a result, when making my Outreachy application, the JupyterHub project immediately piqued my interest because I did not know that there was a way to serve Jupyter Notebooks to multiple users, such as within a classroom setting. Presently, I serve as a mentor at KamiLimu, which is a mentorship program for students pursuing technology-aligned courses in tertiary institutions in Kenya. One of the objectives of KamiLimu is to introduce students to tech specializations such as Data Science and Machine Learning, which, from experience, uses Jupyter Notebooks! Therefore, I am excited to work on JupyterHub because I will be learning about and helping to improve a product I hold dear and which I can use to advance the skills of the next generation of computer technologists in Kenya.
First, I hope to gain a deep understanding of how JupyterHub works so as to spread the word about it and its functionalities. Second, I hope to apply and advance my technical writing skills. I encountered the Diataxis Framework earlier this year while working as a technical writer at Tingle Software, a Nairobi-based software company. I have also been following Daniele Procida (the author of the framework) on Twitter for a while now and his work has been quite inspiring. Through this project, I will apply the Diataxis Framework to restructure JupyterHub’s documentation and, in doing so, further my understanding of the framework. Finally, I am passionate about mentorship, especially in the tech field. Therefore, besides expanding my professional and personal networks, this project will enable me to learn how to conduct mentorship within a global setting, and I can, in turn, apply this knowledge within my local community.
Sheila Kahwai — Create a reusable JupyterHub pytest plugin
JupyterHub is a modular and extensible project, with parts, like the proxy, authenticator and spawner, that can be easily changed and extended. Testing the functionality of these components against JupyterHub is important and it requires various hub setups that can sometimes become complicated.
Currently, each of these hub components and the hub itself define their own testing infrastructure, building everything from the ground up using the pytest framework. But some of this complex work is either repetitive across JupyterHub sub-projects, or under-specified for some of them.
This project will abstract out these common parts into a separate testing framework. This framework should be a pip-installable pytest plugin that would provide various hub functionalities through pytest fixtures. These fixtures can then be re-used by JupyterHub and its components to bootstrap their own testing suite.
Integrating this plugin will drive some important refactoring work of the current testing architecture of JupyterHub and have a great impact in improving the overall test coverage, maintainability and continuity of the JupyterHub project.
Sheila says:
My name is Sheila Kahwai. I am a self-taught python developer from Nairobi, Kenya, working to specialize in back-end engineering.
I am excited to work on JupyterHub because it has made many products I have used throughout my learning journey. It is a privilege to work with a diverse community that has created products that are very useful to equally diverse users like myself.
While creating a reusable JupyterHub pytest plugin, I hope to gain more insight into creating plugins for massive codebases to improve maintainability and scalability with clean and reusable code. Through this project, I look forward to improving the overall testing infrastructure of the various JupyterHub components.
Welcome to the interns! We’re so excited to start working with you!
