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Hi Simon, slightly unrelated question. I'm a big fan of your work, and as I've learnt a lot from reading your blog posts over the years, I'd be curious to know

Hi Simon, slightly unrelated question. I'm a big fan of your work, and as I've learnt a lot from reading your blog posts over the years, I'd be curious to know a bit more about typical use cases for wanting to work with Observable notebooks. The only reason why I'm using A JavaScript notebook tool (Starboard.gg) is to be able to access cool visualisation packages like Anychart or Highcharts. Given the hype around Observable notebooks, I feel that I'm missing something. What makes you decide to start something in an Observable notebook rather than in Jupyter? Thanks!

simonw 3y ago
I primarily use Observable to build interactive tools, as opposed to Jupyter which I use more for exploratory development and analysis. Here are some of my Observable notebooks which illustrate the kind of things I use it for: https://observablehq.com/@simonw/search-for-faucets-with-clip-api https://observablehq.com/@simonw/search-for-faucets-with-cli... https://observablehq.com/@simonw/openai-clip-in-a-browser https://observablehq.com/@simonw/openai-clip-in-a-browser Those are both from https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/ https://observablehq.com/@simonw/gpt4all-models https://observablehq.com/@simonw/gpt4all-models provides a readable version of JSON file on GitHub https://observablehq.com/@simonw/blog-to-newsletter https://observablehq.com/@simonw/blog-to-newsletter is the tool I used to assemble my newsletter A killer feature of Observable notebooks for me is that they provide the shortest possible route from having an idea to having a public URL with a tool that I can bookmark and use later.
- YousefED 3y ago
  Congrats OP on launching this, looking forward to dive further in! It's great to see people experimenting in the Reactive + Live Programming space as like you mention, I think it can bring a lot of improvements to how we build software. Did you run into any limitations adopting this model? > A killer feature of Observable notebooks for me is that they provide the shortest possible route from having an idea to having a public URL with a tool that I can bookmark and use later Thanks for sharing simon! I'm working on an Open Source Notion + Observable combination (https://www.typecell.org https://www.typecell.org), where documents seamlessly mix with code, and can mix with an AI layer (e.g.: https://twitter.com/YousefED/status/1710210240929538447 https://twitter.com/YousefED/status/1710210240929538447) The code you write is pure Typescript (instead of sth custom like ObservableJS) which opens more paths to interoperability (aside from having a public URL). For example, I'm now working to make the code instantly exportable so you can mix it directly into existing codebases (or deploy on your own hosting / Vercel / whatever you prefer).
- LoulouMonkey 3y ago
  Thanks for getting back to me, I'll go through the examples you shared.

simonw 3y ago

I primarily use Observable to build interactive tools, as opposed to Jupyter which I use more for exploratory development and analysis. Here are some of my Observable notebooks which illustrate the kind of things I use it for: https://observablehq.com/@simonw/search-for-faucets-with-clip-api https://observablehq.com/@simonw/search-for-faucets-with-cli... https://observablehq.com/@simonw/openai-clip-in-a-browser https://observablehq.com/@simonw/openai-clip-in-a-browser Those are both from https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/ https://observablehq.com/@simonw/gpt4all-models https://observablehq.com/@simonw/gpt4all-models provides a readable version of JSON file on GitHub https://observablehq.com/@simonw/blog-to-newsletter https://observablehq.com/@simonw/blog-to-newsletter is the tool I used to assemble my newsletter A killer feature of Observable notebooks for me is that they provide the shortest possible route from having an idea to having a public URL with a tool that I can bookmark and use later.

YousefED 3y ago
Congrats OP on launching this, looking forward to dive further in! It's great to see people experimenting in the Reactive + Live Programming space as like you mention, I think it can bring a lot of improvements to how we build software. Did you run into any limitations adopting this model? > A killer feature of Observable notebooks for me is that they provide the shortest possible route from having an idea to having a public URL with a tool that I can bookmark and use later Thanks for sharing simon! I'm working on an Open Source Notion + Observable combination (https://www.typecell.org https://www.typecell.org), where documents seamlessly mix with code, and can mix with an AI layer (e.g.: https://twitter.com/YousefED/status/1710210240929538447 https://twitter.com/YousefED/status/1710210240929538447) The code you write is pure Typescript (instead of sth custom like ObservableJS) which opens more paths to interoperability (aside from having a public URL). For example, I'm now working to make the code instantly exportable so you can mix it directly into existing codebases (or deploy on your own hosting / Vercel / whatever you prefer).
LoulouMonkey 3y ago
Thanks for getting back to me, I'll go through the examples you shared.