Setting up student dev environments

[wtbarnes]

One unresolved issue is how we want the students to set up their dev environment. From our meeting a little over a week ago, the two general options are:

• use a "cloud" environment, e.g. cloud 9
• help students to do a local install with conda

They're are pros and cons to both. Let's try to continue that discussion here.

Starting off, I just went to sign up for a cloud 9 account and I was prompted to enter my credit card for some bizarre reason...

From what I understand, the base service is still free, but they want to have your credit card info for "verification" and in case you want to purchase premium services later. I really don't like having to do this myself or asking student's to do so.

On the other hand, having everything in "the cloud" would make the initial setup way easier and as Dan has pointed out, having access to everyone's work seamlessly is a huge advantage.

[jdbrice]

Hmmm, credit card was not required for me. It may be optional but almost forced or it may be new - my account is almost a year old... I agree, that is a problem

[wtbarnes]

Maybe this is something they've recently introduced? If it was optional they did everything they could to make it appear that was mandatory. It seems a strange way to go about things.

[ajkluber]

Yeah I had the same experience as will just now. Seems the credit card thing is def a recent thing:
https://community.c9.io/t/credit-card-required-for-free-account/7434/3

I am bummed because it did look like a cool thing.

However one further complication with c9 is that there is no way to view figures by default because there isn't X11 forwarding. I don't know if there is a solution to this without doing some annoying workaround.

[ajkluber]

Looks like their solution to disgruntled educators is a $10/month plan that allows educators to sign up as many students to their own account without credit card.

https://community.c9.io/t/credit-card-required-for-free-account/7434/47

[wtbarnes]

This strikes me as a bit gimicky and seems to be in the vain of trying to lure previous free customers into paid plans. At the same time, I can't really fault them for wanting to charge for something like that. It is an impressive service.

I like the idea of a cloud service. I don't like the idea of asking people to put in their credit card to sign up. We could always do the educator plan. I think we can scrounge $10/month between the three of us.

Another option is rolling our own Jupyter Hub on AWS/Digital Ocean though taking a quick look at the pricing (AWS is a bit confusing...), it doesn't look like this will be any cheaper and would certainly be more effort on our part.

If all else fails, we can struggle through everyone doing a local install.