Usually we just visually check whether the ELBO reach to a plateau. You can have a look at this discussion for an example: Poor Accuracy of ADVI for Linear Regression
Jupyter notebook is great! It’s like R notebook. I would say it is fairly easier to learn and you would love it.
If you are concern that you added biased while converting to continuous regression, you can set those parameters to a set value (ie, just set sd=.001).