New updates pave the way for researchers to develop code on Code Ocean
Over the past few months, we’ve been working to make updates to the Code Ocean experience. Today’s release paves the way for additional functionality that will allow researchers to better use Code Ocean as a development platform for code.
Today’s updates include:
- Updates to how researchers create new capsules
- Overhauled Reproducibility Pane to be clearer and easier to use
- Improvements to how published capsules on Code Ocean and within widgets work, making it easier to duplicate, edit and save changed work within your own space on Code Ocean
- Performance improvements
A new flow for compute capsule creation
The environment configuration screen is now the first thing you see when you start a new capsule. This placement prioritizes the setup of computational environment as part of the capsule setup process.
Users no longer start a capsule in a particular language, but rather directly select a base environment via the environment editor. This presents advantages and demystifies the capsule setup process.
Improvements to the Reproducibility Pane
Reproducibility is the backbone of Code Ocean, and making it easy for researchers to use reproducibility best practices throughout their workflow is at the core of our mission. The changes to the Reproducibility Pane paves the way for future improvements while also lending greater clarity and insight into the timeline of events within a capsule.
Previously, this sidebar showed a list of runs and results. Now, the information is in context of specific events like creation, duplication, or submission. This gives a full picture of the entire history of the capsule.
“Run” has also been renamed “Reproducible Run” to make it clear exactly what’s happening behind the scenes when the button is pressed. A Reproducible Run executes an entire capsule, from top to bottom, not just a portion of the code, ensuring full reproducibility.
Easier Duplication of Published Code
We made the experience of interacting with published capsules clearer and easier, both on Code Ocean and via widgets on other sites. We want researchers to be able to easily interact with and iterate on existing published compute capsules for their own experimentation or future work.
Now, when you try to edit a published capsule, we prompt you to duplicate that capsule, saving it to your own personal space in Code Ocean. There you can edit or run the capsule, while the original capsule remains preserved just as the author published it for future reference and comparison.
Performance Improvements
And last but not least, we have made significant upgrades to the backend infrastructure of Code Ocean, making the user experience snappier overall. Initiating runs will be faster and files and capsule load times are shortened.
We’re excited to hear what you think of the new Code Ocean experience. If you have questions or feedback for us, please email us at support@codeocean.com or reach out via Intercom on the site.
