Simplify notebook reviews

[jordandsullivan]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Reviewing changes to ipynb files is often very challenging in Git. We want to simplify it so it doesn't include so many irrelevant lines about metadata for instance.

Describe the solution you'd like
pre-commit git hooks should filter out metadata from

The nbstripout library seems to simplify some of this. You need to configure it not to ignore all outputs though.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Theres also nbdime which is a tool specifically for diffing Jupyter notebooks.

Additional context

[jordandsullivan]

@natestemen I could use your input on this one. Do you like the solution from Mitiq or would one of these tools seem to be better?

[jordandsullivan]

I think I want to prioritize this one, as it should make our upcoming merges much simpler to review.

[natestemen]

It's not totally clear to me what the functions of notebooks are to be in this repository. In Mitiq we only use notebooks for tutorials that get turned into HTML documents. As far as I understand, here in UCC notebooks are being used as a core part of the benchmarking effort. In preparing UCC for release I would think these notebooks would be converted to scripts.

If there is a need to keep notebooks around, I like your suggestion of stripping output/metadata, maybe in conjunction with a tool like https://www.reviewnb.com/.

[jordandsullivan]

The notebooks are there for pedagogical purposes and to make it clear to people what's happening.

[natestemen]

In that case, it sounds like documentation! In the long term, is the goal to convert them to markdown/rst?

[jordandsullivan]

Not exactly, I mean for it to be interactive not static. I'm not imagining having a ton of notebooks just the main run_benchmarks.ipynb for people to be able to run things themselves and see how we're defining each compiler