❄️🎄⛄️🎄❄️

Season's Greetings

The team at Nextjournal has a lot to share this holiday season. New features, new initiatives, and new articles that will bring a smile to researchers and data scientists around the world.

First and foremost, Nextjournal wouldn't be anything without our users. The platform saw its first peer reviewed, reproducible publication, Microbiome interactions shape host fitness, by the team at the Carnegie Science Institute. 🎉

People use Nextjournal to explore ideas every day because it's so darn easy to spin up new computation environments and get work done with collaborators. Remember when exploring computers was fun? Take a break this holiday season, create or remix an article, invite a friend, and start playing!

New Features

After a complete rewrite of Nextjournal's core, the platform is more robust than ever. Our runners boot faster, the editor is more responsive, and the team is releasing new features at a blistering pace. Here are just a few improvements we made this year:

Private articles for individuals and groups
Group improvements that make it easy to invite peers and see who else is working on an article in real time
Private access for S3 buckets, GitHub code repositories, and Docker registries
Robust polyglot support and data references between cells and languages
Import for Jupyter, iPython, Markdown, and RMarkdown files
Export to Markdown
User experience improvements that include article previews, better shortcut keys, code completion, improved history view, better error messages,  and cell output
Countless performance optimizations

Scholarship for Explorable Research

Nextjournal is excited to announced the Nextjournal Scholarship for Explorable Research. This opportunity offers funding and a chance to work with the core team at Nextjournal to help publish your work as a cutting edge, data driven, reproducible article. 

Selected scholars will receive:

$3,000 awarded to the responsible party. $1,500 will be awarded upon selection of the project and $1,500 upon completion of the project.
Unlimited cloud compute resources, private data access and secrets storage during the performance of the project.
Support from our developers to implement your project using Nextjournal.

Submissions will be accepted until January 15, 2019 in your local time zone. More details about the scholarship are available here: https://nextjournal.com/nextjournal/scholarship.

Please share this opportunity with your friends and community!

Team Highlights

The team has also been busy creating our own beautiful articles. Andrea Amantini explored the fold function, made famous by Lisp and now available across many languages; David Schmudde authored a definitive guide for version control of Jupyter Notebooks; Simon Danisch climbed the ranks of Hacker News with an introduction to GPU programming in Julia; Dieter Komendera built a Datomic database instance in a Nextjournal article and explored music history.

A Note About the Animation

The animation was made by Simon Danisch in Julia; it was generated by the Nextjournal article you are reading right now! The source code below leverages a Makie environment built on top of our Julia default.

Shift+Enter to run

Language:Julia

Makie offers a plotting interface with advanced features. For example, the generate_tree function in the code above manipulates a mesh overlay that gives the trees their organic, gentle sway in the wind. The snow and text is generated and placed with the swaying trees on top of a background plate. The entire image is animated and exported to a .gif and saved to /results, a standard Nextjournal directory that saves cell output and can share information between runtimes.

For more information on Julia on Nextjournal see how we build our Julia Environments. 