Hi Everyone,
My name is Eric Rawn. I’m a PhD student at UC Berkeley working with Prof. Sarah Chasins. I study how folks use notebook programming systems and how we might design them differently. Over the last few months I’ve built an extension for Jupyter notebooks which explores how we might bring scope boundaries to collections of cells. We think this might help programmers avoid some of the pain points with notebook interfaces, but we won’t know until we study its use in the real world! We’re interested in evaluating how this change impacts how real users program, and so we’re running a 4-6 week study with folks who use Jupyter notebooks regularly in their everyday work.
Participants in the study would first install the extension in a passive data-gathering mode, allowing the extension to record information about how you use Jupyter notebooks without changing your programming environment. In the second half of the study, you’ll enable the extension and use it for your regular programming work. At the end, you’ll send us all of the data the tool collected, and we’ll interview you about your experience with the tool and your suggestions for how to make it better. Participants will be compensated for their time spent interviewing, at $30/hour. The consent form (linked on the Github page below) has detailed information about the study if you’re interested.
The extension will be released free and open-source after the study. If you like the extension, you’re of course welcome to continue using it after the study ends!
If you’re interested in participating, please fill out this interest interest form and I’ll be in touch!
If you’re curious about the tool, you can check out the GitHub page: GitHub - erawn/pagebreaks: Scope Boundaries for Jupyter Notebooks for a preview of the interface.
If you have any questions at all, feel free to send me an email at erawn@berkeley.edu, and feel free to forward this to anyone you think might be interested!