I finally got a chance to register for and take Paco Nathan’s online course on NLP for O’Reilly, “Get Started with NLP in Python”. Totally enjoyable, although it was very much “intro” material. Paco has this down cold. However, I found the use of Jupyter Notebooks and JupyterHub to be truly amazing. As far as I can tell, 100+ participants got a tiny, ephemeral, on-demand compute server combined with well structured computational content.
And. Stuff. Just. Worked.
I didn’t see any complaints in the hosted chat or Slack channels about setup. The amount of install and deployment toil eliminated must have been phenomenal. This might be the way of the future.