Fully automate dev setup with Gitpod

[melissawm]

This commit implements a fully-automated development setup using Gitpod.io, an
online IDE for GitHub and GitLab that enables Dev-Environments-As-Code.
This makes it easy for anyone to get a ready-to-code workspace for any branch,
issue or pull request almost instantly with a single click.

Fixes #18

[melissawm]

I tried to cover basic instructions for using gitpod. It would be extremely useful if other people could test and see if I missed anything. Keep in mind gitpod is supposed to help people who are not very familiar with git, so while the instructions may seem more complicated than the usual method to us, they are (hopefully) easier to someone less experienced.

[rgommers]

Thanks Melissa, looking forward to having GitPod support!

I tried this out; logging into GitPod and editing a README file was straightforward. The actual dev environment is missing though. Python is installed, but nothing else. Your instructions seem to say that it's for uploading a .ipynb file, but that can be done through the GitHub UI easily enough. So now that we only have notebooks in this repo, I think there's no purpose having GitPod here - there's no development to be done.

On the main repo though it would be awesome - the docker image should then contain an already built development version of NumPy.

[cooperrc]

I tried this out; logging into GitPod and editing a README file was straightforward. The actual dev environment is missing though. Python is installed, but nothing else. Your instructions seem to say that it's for uploading a .ipynb file, but that can be done through the GitHub UI easily enough. So now that we only have notebooks in this repo, I think there's no purpose having GitPod here - there's no development to be done.

Thanks @melissawm, I found that I could edit and run an ipynb in the default editor, but creating a new one I had trouble figuring out how to change cell types.

I ran $ jupyter-notebook in the terminal below the editor and the generated link worked great. I had a full Jupyter environment, but the kernel couldn't be found. It is also nice because I can run the current ipynb's from Gitpod.

Also, the workflow that got gitpod to work for me was just clicking the gitpod button. From there, it looks like you can create a fork of the master.

[melissawm]

Thanks for the feedback! I guess the way forward would be to remove gitpod here and add it to the main repo once I figure out how to build the whole dev environment. However, I just got access to the beta of GitHub Codespaces and that seems exactly like gitpod, so I might put this off for a while and see if codespaces solves our problem. If it does it's probably better to have a first-party application instead of a third-party one. I'll close this PR and update the issue with this info as well.

[matthew-brett]

Just as a meta point - over at JupyterLab, we were worrying that it might be unhealthy for the ecosystem if Microsoft Visual Studio Code starts to dominate in the online notebook market. Is that a reason to prefer Gitpod, regardless of convenience? I believe that Gitpod is based on Theia, with a wider governance governance community than VSCode.

[rgommers]

That code to mind for me too - and I actually quite liked the Gitpod experience, it's smooth.

[melissawm]

Good point. This may be something to discuss in a community meeting, I'll make sure to bring it up.