The New Stack Podcast Teaching a Billion People to Code: How JupyterLite Is Scaling the Impossible
Dec 1, 2025
Sylvain Corlay, Founder and CEO of QuantStack and a key figure in Project Jupyter, discusses the revolutionary JupyterLite, a fully browser-based JupyterLab that democratizes coding education. He shares insights on its impressive implementation in France, supporting hundreds of thousands of students. Corlay highlights the challenges of making programming accessible globally, especially in rapidly growing regions like Nigeria. He also delves into technological hurdles and the importance of collaboration and funding to achieve a billion-user vision.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
From One-Person Project To 30-Person Team
- Sylvain Corlay recounts founding QuantStack in 2016 as a one-person company to support his Jupyter work after leaving Bloomberg.
- The team grew to ~30 people working across Jupyter, Conda-Forge, and Apache Arrow while serving paying clients.
Browser-Only Jupyter At National Scale
- Sylvain Corlay describes JupyterLite as a full Jupyter distribution that runs entirely in the browser, including kernels via WebAssembly builds.
- He cites the French Capytale deployment serving ~500,000 students and 200,000 weekly sessions mostly from a single server hosting only content.
Client-Side Compute Enables Massive Scale
- JupyterLite shifts compute to each user's browser, removing need for cloud-sourced per-user containers for many education use cases.
- This model radically reduces infrastructure and enables massive scalability for simple programming and math lessons.