# Visual-tools meeting 16 - Calva Notebooks & Portal - summary & recording
**URL:** https://clojureverse.org/t/visual-tools-meeting-16-calva-notebooks-portal-summary-recording/9581
**Category:** Meetups and Events
**Tags:** data-visualization, visual-tools
**Created:** [December 1, 2022, 9:59pm UTC](https://clojureverse.org/t/visual-tools-meeting-16-calva-notebooks-portal-summary-recording/9581 "2022-12-01T21:59:01Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@daslu](https://clojureverse.org/u/daslu)
#### Post date: [December 1, 2022, 9:59pm UTC](https://clojureverse.org/t/visual-tools-meeting-16-calva-notebooks-portal-summary-recording/9581/1 "2022-12-01T21:59:01Z")
On Nov 27th, we had the 16th meeting of the [visual-tools group](https://scicloj.github.io/docs/community/groups/visual-tools/), a group for collaborations across different Clojure projects for literate programming and data visualization.
In this meeting, @Lukas_Domagala of the [Calva](https://calva.io/) team and @djblue, [Portal](https://github.com/djblue/portal)’s creator, presented [Calva Notebooks](https://calva.io/notebooks/), their integration with Portal, and other Portal updates.
In the discussion, we also had @PEZ, Calva’s main author, Brian Badahadah of the Portal team, and more friends.
## Recording
[ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x6SQGGWap8)
## Will you join us?
Please reach out if you are interested in this group.
It is recommended to follow the [#visual-tools Zulip stream](https://clojurians.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/313390-visual-tools/) and the [#visual-tools Slack channel](https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/C02V9TL2G3V).
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### Author:  [@orestis](https://clojureverse.org/u/orestis)
#### Post date: [December 2, 2022, 10:26pm UTC](https://clojureverse.org/t/visual-tools-meeting-16-calva-notebooks-portal-summary-recording/9581/2 "2022-12-02T22:26:29Z")
This is amazing, and I did a double take when I realized this is actually already released, and ready to be tinkered with.
@Lukas_Domagala , @PEZ & co - is this thread a good place to provide early feedback? Is it the right time to provide feedback?
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### Author:  [@orestis](https://clojureverse.org/u/orestis)
#### Post date: [December 3, 2022, 4:11pm UTC](https://clojureverse.org/t/visual-tools-meeting-16-calva-notebooks-portal-summary-recording/9581/3 "2022-12-03T16:11:55Z")
I’m too excited to wait so I’ll just offer my 2 cents here:
- I really appreciate the goal statement: turning normal Clojure namespaces into Notebooks. As someone who does no data stuff whatsoever, I can’t use notebooks for my normal day-to-day work.
- The Notebook approach closes the hole that VSCode has: we cannot show a nice HTML popup of the evaluated code results in the main editor.
- I think that the work done in Calva & Portal might help a lot in circling back to the `calva.output` window (perhaps making it a web view where the evaluated results are mini-portals?) - and if VSCode ever adds HTML popups, Calva could show mini-portals in there too.
- Notebooks have some pretty dangerous buttons like “execute all”, but Clojure code in rich comment forms is written with the assumption that it will be run manually. I definitely have dangerous side effects in my rich comment forms, especially in namespaces that are meant to “patch production”.
- Performance can be problematic if there are so many mini-portal elements on the screen. Perhaps for scalar values (booleans, numbers etc) and definitely for functions, it would be nice if Portal was skipped entirely.
- A riff on the above, sometimes a pretty-printed value is enough, that could probably be provided by Calva rendering the output script to static HTML and having that as an option? Then Portal could be opt-in instead of the default for all evaluations.
Thanks for getting this off the ground, it looks like a great addition to Calva!
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### Author:  [@system](https://clojureverse.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [June 4, 2023, 4:12am UTC](https://clojureverse.org/t/visual-tools-meeting-16-calva-notebooks-portal-summary-recording/9581/4 "2023-06-04T04:12:02Z")
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