Testing Google Colaboratory

I have been shopping around for a new laptop lately, and my specific list of ‘wants’ has been pointing me toward a few chromebooks. I’m going to be using this computer for programming and data analysis work, so I wanted to make sure that a chromebook will be up to the task.

Google Colaboratory

There are a bunch of cloud development platforms out there, but I wanted to try the Google offering first since it is sure to work well on a system running ChromeOS. I have to say I’m impressed. Jupyter notebooks in the cloud with easy Google Drive access - it just works.

Github Gist

Conveniently, Github allows rendering of Jupyter notebooks in Gists, so I uploaded a copy of the notebook to Github, and will embed it below. If you are interested in viewing the notebook on Github, it can be found here

Here is the final graph from the above notebook: graph

Conclusion

All in all, I’m very happy with how this little experiment turned out. I’m not sure I’d go with a bottom spec chromebook, but would be fairly comfortable getting a higher-spec chromebook like a Pixelbook. I will keep shopping and certainly provide an update if (when) I end up with a new machine :)

Photo Credit

Photo by Evan Dvorkin on Unsplash