Update: I built a way to visualize Jupyter notebook diffs!

[u/samwisesami]

Diffy allows you to view a visual diff of your Jupyter notebook PRs, whether there are code, markdown, or cell output changes.

Diffy allows you to view diffs for most media types - even interactive Plotly visualizations!

[u/samwisesami]

Hi everyone!

This is Sami again 😅 I posted last month about building an AI-powered programming environment for Jupyter notebooks! I have since been able to speak to more data scientists, and uncovered a pain point when dealing with Jupyter notebooks: PR reviews. Diffs are often hard to read for Jupyter notebooks because of the excessive metadata and base64 strings embedded in the file structure, and so I spent the last couple of weeks building Diffy!

Diffy, in a few bullet points, allows you to:

• view a *visual* diff of your Jupyter notebook changes, so you can review changes in a much more consumable way- see your cell outputs

• whether they’re images, audio files, or interactive visualizations - which is infinitely better than the base64 spam that I’m used to seeing in my GitHub diffs

• view any active GitHub PRs from your linked repositories and comment on any cells

I’d love to get your feedback on Diffy! It’s completely free (at least for now - haven’t figured that stuff out yet 😅 - would love thoughts there too) and I’d be more than happy to demo it to anyone here.

[u/rolozo → u/samwisesami]

How does it compare to nbdime? Where is the source code?

[u/samwisesami → u/rolozo]

My biggest apologies for not getting to this earlier!

nbdime is actually used behind the scenes to get the diff representation that is rendered out on Diffy! I don't believe nbdime handles interactive Plotly visualizations - which I'm a huge fan of - as well as some other media types that are covered here.

Diffy isn't open-source (at least yet!), but I'm happy to answer any questions you may have about it. I'll be stalking my notifications to make sure I get back to any questions/comments asap haha