Best Practices for Writing Reproducible and Maintainable Jupyter Notebooks

Simple steps to make your Jupyter Notebooks great

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Introduction

Writing Jupyter Notebooks that are reproducible, maintainable, and easy to understand is not as easy as you might think. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s actually really hard. In this article, I’m going to explain why it is so hard and give you some recommendations for best practices that helped me to achieve better reproducibility and maintainability.

What are Jupyter Notebooks

First, let me give you a short introduction what Jupiter Notebooks are. Basically, a Jupyter Notebook is an interactive document. You can write plain text with Markdown syntax and also use mathematical formulas via LaTeX syntax. Additionally, you can add code to a notebook that the reader can execute to produce some output such as a visualization.

For instance, you could visualize a function that is based on various parameters. The reader could use sliders to change the values of these parameters and the visualization is updated every time a value is changed (see the example below). You could also add code that performs live queries to some database to get the latest sales numbers and to plot them in an pie chart for…