Have you tried quarto markdown? It’s similar to rmarkdown but language agnostic and allows me to think in code in a way that can easily be added to notebooks. To work with them in notebook fashion I can work through one file a day and save the rendered pages in a folder.
Quarto, I think, is definitely a step in the right direction. It allows for publication quality rendering into pdf, and various html flavors including Confluence. You can write fluently in it, mix-in actual running code, and you've got options for sophisticated graphics, tables and mathematics.
I do hope the Quarto project makes it and survives. It's a cut above the other notebook solutions like jupyter.
What's the advantage of Quarto over Jupyter? I looked at Quarto and rejected it because I couldn't find a way for a single cell to programatically generate interleaved markdown and plots (I can do this with Jupyter).
Not sure what you mean as there is no notion of "cell" in Quarto.
Instead, everything is markdown and you can interleave codeblocks (or inline code statements) anywhere you like to generate plots/tables, etc.
I haven't had a need to generate markdown programmatically, though I imagine there's probably at least a "hard way" to do that. FWIW, quarto is still in its early stages. The quarto devs on github are very nice and responsive to questions if you ever look into again.
Quarto is fantastic for making presentations as well!
If you're a developer and want to have your presentations amenable to being tracked in git, with all of the figures made from code and so on, Quarto is the absolute best you can do.
It's phenomenal and every developer should be using it.
I finally gave it a look, and it seems attractive. A feature, in my mind, is that it doesn't replace Jupyter, so I can still use the more basic tool when I'm up to my elbows in lab stuff. I actually use Jupyter to automate experiments, not just theory and data analysis.
But... the first thing I'll do is try quarto for my passive web page, which I presently generate using nbconvert.
Two days ago I read a comment containing this mention of Revolut, might you be able to counter what was said?
> "And please, do not recommend Revolut, look up their 2021 audit and the lack of 2022 accounts, so far. Not touching that. If and when they can convince the brits they are gucci I will take a look, not until."
According to Financial Times [1], Revolut submitted their application for a UK banking license in 2021. To be clear, it is still pending. (Tip: Run away!) I think it is a terrible idea to keep more than 1000 EUR (or equiv) with them. Only an amount that you can 100% afford to lose. Their audits are smelly as hell. And why would you "bank" with an org that isn't licensed... for banking? The unnecessary risks that people take with their finances are just bizarre to me.
Unfortunately I had a similar thing happen with my Revolut account as people are reporting with Wise.
Revolut blocked my account when it contained the money I needed to pay a bill, and it took 5 days to unblock the account with atrocious customer support throughout.
The only means of contact was in-app chat, and I would often not get a reply for 6 to 12 hours. Sometimes the agent would abandon, saying it was the end of their shift, but I wouldn't be transferred to anyone else When I did get a reply it was so many hours later, and bizarrely in the middle of the night, that I was asleep by then. The agent would close the chat as I wasn't responding in a couple of minutes. This pattern by itself took days.
During that time I was asked to (and did) upload numerous photos of other bank cards that they requested, then they asked for more, then to do it again, and nothing seemed to progress. Just groundhog day with each new agent.
What worked for me in the end was social media: I replied to something from Revolut on Facebook. As if by magic, within a few minutes I got a message from someone saying I would shortly be contacted by customer support and they would unblock my account. Miracously the impossible happened and the whole thing from my Facebook message to unblocked account took about 20 minutes, no id or photos or long chats required. After 5 days burdensome nonsense that seemed stuck forever.
I took my money out straight away, and I've avoided storing more than a small balance on my Revolut account ever since. I use it daily but will never store much balance. They'd like me to use it as my main current account, for salary etc. No way would I take that risk with Revolut now!
Separately, after using the account for a year or so I was asked to provide a photo of valid passport or driving license (or maybe some other options I don't recall) which I had already gone through with them when opening the account. This prompted me to ask what they do for people without either, as many people in the UK don't have any of their short list of required documents.
Their answer was matter of fact: We don't provide accounts to those people even though we know there are many of them. If they had an account already, they'd have to close it. That really bothered me.
I was able to comply, though I too would fail now since my passport expired during the pandemic and I haven't renewed yet.
On a related note, someone recently sent me a small amount, a nice gesture, using Western Union money transfer. We all assumed I could collect the money from a Weetern Union service desk in town, because that's what Western Union is known for.
To my amazement I was unable to collect the money because they required types of id I didn't have, and none of my family had either. I'm a company director with public records, and countless bank accounts and other ways to transfer money, including Revolut and Wise. Yet I wasn't able to collect a small cash gift from Western Union, the service that is supposed to be for everyone. The desk staff confirmed, that's just how it is. We had to tell the sender they had to go to the sending office and ask for their money back. They struggled to believe we had no way to pick it up.
Don't get me started on Barclays... Rejected our business address "because we looked online and it says your address is a co-working space". It isn't, it's a big building "innovation centre" where many serious companies rent private offices (including private mail and reception service), which happens to have a tiny co-working space downstairs (which we were not using), whose marketing they found. Barclays were having none of it and said they would have to close the business account unless we changed address to another building. The agent confirmed if any of the other companies were using Barclays they'd have the same problem.
The troubles at Wise bother me as I use it a lot for cross-border business transactions and keep.a healthy balance in there in multiple currencies. It's been excellent for me so far, noticeably better than all other banks or quasi-banks I've used (many). I don't trust Revolut (due to the above experiences) and I don't know of another good and fast service with low currency conversion costs in the UK.
I'll add, when Barclays rejected the business address, that wasn't for a new account or change of address. It was a very active account nearly 10 years old, and the address never changed in that time. It was just a weird surprise, accompanied by a stressful threat of account closure.
Last time I opened a personal bank account with a high street branch was 25 years ago, and I think I took my birth certificate.
These days, looking at the Barclays list from the sibling comment, I'd use a letter from HMRC, which I have, but many people in regular salaried employment don't (income tax is completely automated for most).
Other than an HMRC letter, it look like I don't have anything that qualifies as an Id document in the Barclays list. So I couldn't open a high street bank account today if I wanted to.
I actually couldn't vote in the last local election, since they introduced new Id requirements for that, and by the time I learned of the new requirements I had no way to vote. I've voted for decades; that was the first time I couldn't, and hopefully the last as well.
In my experience this kind of thing ("document from list A, another document from list B") is fairly common, as the UK does not have any sort of common identity card, plus there are lots of corner cases such as foreigners with residency rights. It's actually getting harder to do as more and more utility bills move to paperless.
From their web page: passport; EU/EEA-issued ID; driving license; residence permit; emergency passport or travel document; asylum seeker residence permit; ship passport. (Plus a separate proof of address, which was not a problem.)
A lot of people in th UK don't have a currently valid passport or driving license, especially after not travelling for a few years due to the pandemic, or if they are young, or old, or never left the country. The other items in the list are unlikely for a UK citizen in the UK.
The nearest I had was a passport which had expired just a few months before but they wouldn't accept it. They required a currently valid passport. That's unusual; many places accept an expired passport especially if it's recently expired.
I really didn't expect such a restrictive id list to receive a small cash transfer from Western Union of all places. The whole point is you go in and show the receipt the sender gave you so you can collect.
While the grand parent's tone is not appropriate and has been duely downvoted. They do point out that nbdev is currently closely linked around pushing code and docs to GitHub. This is something which threw me at first but isn't a requirement. You can set it up to work only locally.
The GitHub flavor is likely just because that is what the author was familiar with and what they were using.
If there are enough people interested we could get together to make PRs to add other remote version control systems and other static site hosts. I know an integration into the Atlassian world would really help me at work as that's my employer's chosen code repo and doc manager.
