Microsoft Azure

Notebook Libraries

Software Engineering Intern

June 2016-August 2016

June 2016-August 2016

About Azure Notebooks

During the course of my internship at Microsoft, I worked on the Azure Notebooks team. Their core product, found here, strives to enable users to use and manage their Jupyter notebooks in the Microsoft Azure cloud. Traditionally, Jupyter notebooks are run locally on a user's computer. The project that I worked on over the summer was called "Notebook Libraries". Libraries enables teachers and students to upload and share their course material and homework. After finishing the initial release of Notebook Libraries, I was then assigned the task to redesign the entire website to match the Azure product ecosystem.

Notebook Libraries research

For the first 3 weeks of my internship, I reached out to users of the Jupyter Notebook in data science. After speaking and interviewing 10 users, I found that the most relevant market for Notebook Libraries was in the field of education. Next, after interviewing teachers and students in the data science field, from a variety of different schools, three core necessities continually came up: little to no setup for Jupyter notebooks, shareability, and the service needed to be free to be successful in education. With these core necessities, I worked with my team to come up with a wireframe for a feasible 1.0 release that I could ship by the end of the summer.

Azure Notebooks Website Overhaul + Notebook Libraries

With the new design of the notebook libraries feature, I applied my findings from my interviews with users. However, once I finished my initial summer project, the rest of the Azure Notebooks website seemed to be out of place. And after looking at the styling of the elements, I found that the Azure Notebooks website was not conforming to Microsoft's Design Specifications. So, for the last 2 weeks of my internship, I took on the task to rapidly design and develop the new Azure Notebooks website to ship alongside the notebook libraries feature.