Running Racket in the cloud

Oh excellent—I had been a long-time lurker on the racket mailing list, and this was the first thread on the discourse server that caught my eye!

Apologies if this posting is too commercial for this forum, but I thought I'd mention something I just started tinkering with in my off hours. (Disclaimer: this is tangentially related to my day-job working on open data at AWS, but opinions are solely mine etc, etc.). AWS recently started giving away free Jupyter Notebook instances that are fairly powerful (16GB RAM, optional GPU currently). Towards that, there is a github repository of examples, including examples in languages other than the default Python.

I've put together a draft notebook that installs Racket, the IRacket Jupyter kernel, and some dependencies in a mostly sandboxed Conda environment. I've also started putting together a notebook that illustrates using Racket with Jupyter / SageMaker Studio Lab.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty novice with respect to Racket coding ability, so if anyone has suggestions about something interesting to show off in Racket (or better yet wants to make a pull request :wink: ), I'm all ears. In particular, anything showing off data processing, data visualization, or any aspect of statistics or machine learning would be of interest.

Relatedly, if people are doing work in the cloud and are looking for real datasets representing a wide variety of domains, formats, and volumes to work with in-situ in the cloud, my team at work runs the Registry of Open Data on AWS. I selfishly want to see more usage of Racket when working with scientific data! If anyone finds themselves doing something interesting with open data & Racket, please let me know and I'd love to get your work included as usage examples or even blog about it with you.

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