Introduction to Google Colaboratory

Hey there, my name’s Makar Baderko, I’m a 12-year-old Data Scientist and today I’m going to introduce you to one of my best friends in coding — Google Colab.

Colab is a web-based Jupyter-like IDE, which is mostly used by ML Engineers. Here you access free Tesla GPUs or connect to your hosted or local sources.

On the first screen, you can choose where to save your notebook Google Drive or Github. I personally use GitHub, because there you can do the version controlling stuff. Also, google is so kind, that gives some pretty looking examples of Colab Notebooks. Don’t be lazy — look through them.

Ok, so let’s imagine, that you’ve created your first .ipynb notebook in collab — what will you see? We will start with the menubar, which is situated on the left. The first section shows you the structure of your code: when you use Headings or some sort of markdown here, it will be shown here.

The next section should not be tough – it has its place in any IDE: Find and replace. For example, if in the middle of coding process you would like to change the name of the variable, or find some pice of code – welcome to this section. I often use it in big projects, where I can’t remember where is each function placed

Any coder will find the code snippets section really useful, because here you can find official pieces of code that will help you to use especially Colab features, for example, webcam image capturing or files uploading.

The last section is used the most because it emulates the file system. If you need to upload any sort of data or work with the system files, this place will be your favourite. Also, you’re able to connect the google drive and use files that are stored there. Be careful! Files that were uploaded to the session storage will not be saved!

The upper menu-bar stays the same except one column — Runtime, here you can run all of the cells, run before current cell and lots of interesting things.

Except stays the same as in Jupyter Lab/Notebook