# Build A Binder Birmingham

Shared notes from the workshop day.

## Introductions

Introduce yourself and short sentence about what it is you want to get out of this day.

Tim - spread knowledge about what mybinder.org can do and how to do it.
Erick Ratamero - I'm a Research Fellow at Warwick doing research support on image analysis. I'd like to start working on a basic Python training repo that students can interact with. If there's any cake leftover by the end of the day, I'd not be opposed to taking it.
Matthew Brett - I'm interested in using BinderHub for courses I'm teaching on data science, and on brain imaging.
Vince Knight - It took my 120 minutes to travel here. I'm a mathematician from Cardiff University. I'm interested in using binder for some teaching resource (python and/or game theory) and also for make my research reproducible.
Angus Fisk - I really want some cake. Neuroscientist hoping to share analysis.
Riccardo - I'd like to use Binder to share research related software within my collaboration. I'm an astrophysicist working in the LIGO collaboration. It took me 4m30s to come here from the Physics Department.
Jeremy Pike - Im an image analyst at Birmingham. Would like to share research outputs and teaching material
John Roberts - I'm a software engineer at the Centre for Landscape and Climate Research in Leicester; I'd like to use Binder as a teaching resource for our international training courses in satellite image analysis
Louise Bowler - I'm interested in using Binder for some of the projects in our reproducible research programme at the Alan Turing Institute. It took about two hours to get here - so not too bad! I'd particularly like to make sure I can set up a Binder project with some larger datasets that can't be included in a GitHub repo.
Laurence Hurst - slightly over 60 minutes to get here - hoping to find out what binder can do for our researchers, use cases for it from their point of view. Personally I'm interested in if I can use it for materials to support my own work coaching researchers to code.
Lotte - About 180 minutes from London (including scenic walk through Birmingham), here to learn how to make the auditory computational neuroscience models of my lab accessible to The World TM

## Questions about Binder

Collect questions and answers about Binder here.

Q: What supports the infrastructure on which mybinder runs? (Real question: if I put a course on binder, is it likely to no longer be available in X years?) {Vince Knight}
A: Currently the cloud bill is paid for by a grant from the Moore foundation.

Q: Is a new container built everytime a new "instance" is launched? (Every time a student clicks on the link is that using a different/new container?) {Vince Knight}
A: Nope. But it depends, a new instance is built depending on what the thing is building. To be returned to in the presentation

Q: You mentioned computational limits on each instance - what are those in a bit more detail? (can I run something that takes an hour?) {Erick Ratamero}
A: 1GB RAM, 1 "Google Cloud" CPU, max runtime is 8h. Killed after 10-20mins idle time. Maximum number of concurrent users is 100 (users get a message indicating they're 101st) - from try.jupyter - Found built image, launching...
Too many users running https://github.com/ipython/ipython-in-depth! Try again soon. {Angus}

Q: Can you cache containers from multiple commits? Asking because being able to walk people through an evolving notebook would be lovely. {John Roberts}
A. If you specifiy a specific commit, that image is static and will never change. So Yes! The last part of the mybinder.org URL to launch a new binder specifies the commit https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/binder-examples/requirements/d83e444fe519b20f92610ad60026b35f012afb96 will always build that commit

Q: I have created a binder image: is it possible to get the link to a specific live notebook in the repo? {Vince Knight}
A: Yes, we will be shown how. https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/binder-examples/requirements/master?filepath=index.ipynb will directly open `index.ipynb`

Q: Could JISC setup BinderHub for the whole UK?
(https://www.jisc.ac.uk/staff/martin-hamilton would be a good person to contact about this)
PH asked this on Twitter https://twitter.com/martin_hamilton/status/1019155289906532353

Q: How do we make it easier for others to setup BinderHub at their institution?
A:

Q: If I have a gitlab service hosted on campus (which requires authentication), can mybinder still interface with it? {Riccardo}
A: mybinder.org can't (and won't) fetch private repositories. If you setup your own BinderHub the hooks exist to fetch material from private sources.

Q: If I find a mybinder instance interesting for my work, can I get the docker image associated to it?
A: No, but you can use repo2docker to build it yourself in exactly the same way.

Q: You mentioned that mybinder could run Rstudio: I assume JupyterHub is not used in this instance but that repo2docker somehow recognises such a repo and builds it appropriately? {Vince Knight}
A: Jupyter server still starts, talks to Rstudio.

Q: After clicking `Launch` how do I recover the copy url? {Vince Knight}
A: Go back to to mybinder.org and enter the repo url again

Q: Assume repositories have to be public? Can't share private repositories?
A: Definitely no as it's a public service and everything is effectively fully public

## Zero to Binder

A guide with words on how to setup a simple binder (with pointers to ideas):
https://github.com/Build-a-binder/build-a-binder.github.io/tree/master/workshop

## Links to cool things

Links to the cool examples of projects here:

spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features
github.com/choldgraf/textbooks-with-jupyter
RStudio https://github.com/binder-examples/r
ThinkDSP https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/AllenDowney/ThinkDSP/master?filepath=code%2Fcacophony.ipynb
Interactive documentation https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features
Textbooks with jupyter https://github.com/choldgraf/textbooks-with-jupyter
appmode, dashboard like apps https://github.com/binder-examples/appmode
Electromagnetism with Jupyter https://em.geosci.xyz/index.html
openrefineder, completely different apps work as well https://github.com/betatim/openrefineder

## Break out session

Collecting ideas (after lunch) for possible break out sessions you want to help run or take part in. Note that you can run a breakout on something you want to learn about, you don't need to know the answer!

Tim is interested in "If I am going to put the code for my next paper on GitHub and also Binderize it what are the minimum best practices for what to include in the repo" <-- +1!! {Angus} https://hackmd.io/7dd0w36IQ1CcNAoCqvo1cA

John is interested in fetching parts of large datasets for demonstration purposes; but any image analysis is also good.
Result: https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/clcr/eos_binder_test/master
Binder notebook that pulls a large (but sparse) image from a web source and performs transitive opening and closing on it using OpenCV and Gdal (both of which are large and unweildy libraries)

Vince is interested in using what he learnt this morning to setup a number of binders for his teaching resources.
https://github.com/drvinceknight/gt with linked webpage

Jeremy, Illustrating use of an R-package hosted on Github using Binder.

Erick forked and adapted a repo with "introduction to Python" notebooks and found out a repo (Binder-ready!) with a scijava/ImageJ kernel.
https://github.com/erickmartins/scijava-jupyter-kernel
https://github.com/erickmartins/intro_programming

Generating notebooks to teach principles of programming not any particular language
https://github.com/loz-hurst/test-binder

### Setting up your own BinderHub
Lotte is interested in the baby steps of setting up her own BinderHub/JupyterHub.

Configuration for https://notebooks.gesis.org/ can be found at https://github.com/gesiscss/orc