Google Colab 🔗

I was just reading through Maggie Appleton’s post on “Computational Notebooks”¹, and came across Google Colab which provides free cloud compute for Jupyter Notebooks. The notebooks are just saved in your google drive account, and it’s dead simple to get up and running. Just open the link above, click “file” then “new notebook” and you’re off to the races.

I’ve used them for prototyping functions, data visualization, and as interactive documentation for little packages I was working on at the time. If you work with Python regularly, and have not came across these notebooks yet, I’d definitely recommend giving them a try!

I first ran into Python’s “Jupyter Notebooks” in an AI/ML course I was taking in university. I was a bit hesitant at first, but after going through a few labs where the notebook explained the code and theory we were going to explore, then had executable, editable code examples inline, I was hooked.