I recently started a new newsletter focus on AI education. TheSequence is a no-BS( meaning no hype, no news etc) AI-focused newsletter that takes 5 minutes to read. The goal is to keep you up to date with machine learning projects, research papers and concepts. Notebooks are the data scientist best friend and can also be a nightmare to work with. For someone accustomed to work with modern integrated develop environments(IDEs), working with notebooks feels like going back decades.

Notebooks are the data scientist best friend and can also be a nightmare to work with. For someone accustomed to work with modern integrated develop environments(IDEs), working with notebooks feels like going back decades. Furthermore, modern notebook environments is mostly constrained to Python programs and lack first-class support for other programming languages. Polynote was born out of the necessity to accelerate data science experimentation at Netflix. Over the years, Netflix has built a world-class machine learning platform mostly based on JVM languages like Scala.

Machine learning and data science development isn't exactly a walk in the park, but Netflix hopes to streamline the arduous bits with a new freely available platform. The tech giant today announced that it has open-sourced Polynote, a multi-language programming notebook environment that integrates with Apache Spark and offers robust support for Scala, Python, and SQL. In a blog post, Netflix said that Polynote -- which has seen "substantial" adoption among its personalization and recommendation teams -- was designed to enable data scientists and AI researchers to integrate Netflix's JVM-based machine learning framework with Python machine learning and visualization libraries. "On the Netflix personalization infrastructure team, our job is to accelerate machine learning innovation by building tools that can remove pain points and allow researchers to focus on research. Polynote originated from a frustration with the shortcomings of existing notebook tools, especially with respect to their support of Scala," said the company.

We are pleased to announce the open-source launch of Polynote: a new, polyglot notebook with first-class Scala support, Apache Spark integration, multi-language interoperability including Scala, Python, and SQL, as-you-type autocomplete, and more. Polynote provides data scientists and machine learning researchers with a notebook environment that allows them the freedom to seamlessly integrate our JVM-based ML platform -- which makes heavy use of Scala -- with the Python ecosystem's popular machine learning and visualization libraries. It has seen substantial adoption among Netflix's personalization and recommendation teams, and it is now being integrated with the rest of our research platform. At Netflix, we have always felt strongly about sharing with the open source community, and believe that Polynote has a great potential to address similar needs outside of Netflix. Polynote promotes notebook reproducibility by design.