Python 3.6 with Domino in Minutes

For Pythonistas like me, the holidays started a little early with today's release of Python 3.6.

In case you haven't heard, Python 3.6 has a number of improvements:

• Speed and memory usage optimizations including low-level improvements at the CPython layer.
• New syntax features including a new kind of string literal called "f-strings", standard annotations for function parameters, and asynchronous generators and comprehensions.
• Standard library improvements from asyncio to datetime.
• Security improvements like the new secrets module and support for OpenSSL 1.10.

Thanks to Domino, I was able to install Python 3.6 into a Domino Compute Environment in a matter of seconds without making a mess of my stable environment or my local development setup.

All I had to do was:

1. Create a Domino Compute Environment with this Dockerfile.
2. Set my project to use that compute environment.
3. Tell Domino to spin up a Jupyter notebook session for me.

And now I have my own Python 3.6 / Jupyter 4.3 playground to work in, inside of Domino's Reproducibility Engine. Here's a gif showing you the steps above:

Want to try this yourself? I’ve published a public forkable project on Domino here, so you can click “Fork” and be on your way to experimenting with Python 3.6 without installing any software

If you’d like to learn more about how you can quickly iterate your data science environment and tools without having to ask IT for permission, you can watch a demo here.

Banner image titled “Season of Light” by oh_hellogina. Licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.