Final-year engineering students at many universities have to complete a “Capstone” project that gives them a chance to apply everything they learned throughout school to a practical, hands-on group project. My team just finished ours – a project called NBDiff – and I’m happy to report that it was a success.
If you’ve spoken to me in the last couple years, you’ve probably heard me ramble about the IPython Notebook, a rich web-based environment for scientific computing. Well, that project is wonderful, but there’s a catch with working on notebook files: the file format is a giant JSON blob and makes version control tricky. If you use git diff, it can be hard to understand what you’ve actually changed, and if you need to resolve a merge conflict? Fasten your seatbelt.
NBDiff takes a stab at making these tasks easier. It presents diffs in a two-pane format and shows you deleted/added cells how you originally saw them in the notebook: if an image was changed, you see the image instead of a 10000-line diff of a base64 encoded PNG file. When resolving merge conflicts, you don’t have to worry about mangling the JSON by hand – you just drag and drop changes into the final version and click ‘save’.
As far as school projects go, this one was very satisfying. We have 50 GitHub stars and several hundred downloads already; I can actually use it to solve problems right now; and the IPython folks are interested in seeing it maintained beyond Capstone. Considering many school projects – even Capstone projects – never see the light of day, let alone continued maintenance, I’m really happy about this.
