Setting up a development environment is always a pain. My development environment was geared toward Ruby since I used to be a Rails developer. And that environment set up was a cumulative process over several months. I had somewhat of a Python development environment, as I had Anaconda 3 installed, but I forgot how to get Jupyter Notebooks up and running in Terminal. An extra layer of complexity is that I like to have shortcut commands in Terminal so I had to set those up too. I think to avoid all this one day I will just use an IDE or a virtual environment.

Anyway, here are the steps.

Install Anaconda (and Jupyter Notebooks)

1. Go to the Anaconda website and download the latest distribution for Mac.
2. Follow all the installation steps. It should install to the /Users/<user>/anaconda3/bin/anaconda path. If you go which anaconda in Terminal it will show this path.
3. Jupyter Notebooks will be installed with Anaconda in the /Users/<user>/anaconda3/bin/jupyter-notebook folder.

Create commands and aliases for bash/zsh to make Anaconda and Jupyter Notebooks run

1. Go to your ~/.bashrc file (or ~/.zshrc file in my case since I use zsh)
2. To make Anaconda executable, add export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/anaconda3/bin to the file. This will allow you to use the conda shortcut in Terminal.
3. To run Jupyter Notebooks with a simple jupyter-notebook command, add alias jupyter-notebook="/Users/<user>/anaconda3/bin/jupyter-notebook" to the file.

Deal with this ridiculous matplotlib font cache issue

Do what this StackOverflow post says to do.