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Hi! 👋 You’re reading the first ever marimo newsletter.
As a reminder, marimo is an open-source reactive notebook for Python that’s reproducible, git-friendly (stored as Python files), executable as a script, and deployable as an app.
There’s just two of us working on marimo: Myles Scolnick and me. Though we launched on Hacker News just one month ago, marimo has actually been in development for almost two years now. Here’s a bit about how we got started.
When I was a PhD candidate, working on embeddings for machine learning and visualization, I used Jupyter notebooks almost daily — they were useful, but also very frustrating. Having seen engineers invent the future at Google Brain, I was convinced that there must be a way to build a better programming environment for working with data — one that made data tangible and actionable, while also solving the long list of problems that notebooks suffer from.
After graduating with a PhD at the end of 2021, and after many post-it driven brainstorming sessions, I decided to build that better programming environment. I pitched my vision for marimo to a research lab and it resonated with them. We set up an agreement that enabled me to work on marimo full-time in a closed beta, while collecting feedback from the researchers as well as machine learning engineers and developers at a few other select companies.
Today, marimo is open source, and we’re dedicated to making it the best programming environment for doing research and communicating it; running computational experiments and scaling them; and learning computer science and teaching it.
Though we’ve been working on marimo for a while, it feels like we’re just getting started: there’s a lot more we’re working on that we’re excited to share with you soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in helping shape marimo’s future or just following along, you can hang out with us on Discord, open an issue on GitHub, or follow us on Twitter.
If you have any feedback or just want to meet us, we’re always down to chat: just reply to this email to start a conversation.
Sincerely, Akshay
