The superheroes and the magic wand
This is the first of a series of posts describing tools in the JupyterHub ecosystem, written by our wonderful Contributor in Residence, Georgiana. For our first post, we’ll share some lore of JupyterHub, and tell you a story of how it all began…
In a place far, far away, on a planet called Jupyter, magic happens every day. This land is special because it’s full of magical tools with all kind of powers, devoted to one common purpose: to help people. Everyone sympathizing with this goal either advocates, uses, or cares for these tools. So, in the blink of an eye, these people with sometimes nothing else in common than the same drive to help others, gathered together and formed a community.
This special group is known in the galaxy as “The Jovyans” and new recruits join every day. 🚀
But somebody needed to take care of these magical tools. So, the first Jovyans decided that from then on, they will become tool-keepers. Because their greatest responsibility was to teach new Jovyans how to use the magic, shortly after, they created a set of guiding laws. Some call this “the Documentation”.
The magic wand
One greatly cherished tool on planet Jupyter is the magical wand. This wand’s very special power is to help people work together as a team and find solutions to important problems.
The wand is called “JupyterHub”.
But the wand is of vast complexity and because of this, so are the guiding laws that control it.
As a consequence, people trying to benefit from the magic of JupyterHub, spent a lot of time reading and understanding the instructions.
The superheros
The tool-keepers noticed that most of the people coming to planet Jupyter to become Jovyans were from a big city in the cloud 🌤 called Kubernetes. So they gathered together and debated what is the best way to help the people of Kubernetes.
After 3 days and 3 nights of intense discussions (also lots of pizza breaks of course) they decided that one of them needed to get special training, rent a house in Kubernetes and teach the people there the wonders of the JupyterHub magic wand.
The Chosen One gained the people’s trust, and it got better and better at anticipating and understanding their needs. So the locals started seeing it as a superhero and they even gave it a name, “Z2JH”. 👓
The news of these events started to spread far and wide, and people living in little towns outside of Kubernetes felt that they deserved the support of a superhero too. They also had great ideas and little time and needed to use the wand’s magic to do good.
The tool-keepers were inspired by the magnificent accomplishments of these little towns, taking place even without a superhero around. So the littlest of them all, volunteered to go into superhero training to help the people of the little towns do good, faster. Though it was little, in no time, it grew to become the helper these small groups needed.
The residents called it “The Littlest JupyterHub” or “TLJH” because of its stature. But everybody knew that its stature didn’t reflect its enormous tenacity, speed and ability to do great things. This ended up inspiring people all over to believe that not all superheros wear capes, nor do they need to know how to fly in the cloud to be cool.
Nowadays, people from all over join their forces and help the superheros learn new skills. Thanks to them, TLJH and Z2JH get stronger and better and have more special powers than they had when first created by the tool-keepers. Join them, become a Jovyan! ツ
