DrWatson 1.0 - the perfect sidekick to your scientific inquiries is out!

Datseris · August 31, 2019, 2:52pm

Dear All,

I am very happy to announce the first major release of DrWatson: version 1.0!
Here is our documentation:

https://juliadynamics.github.io/DrWatson.jl/dev/

DrWatson is a scientific project assistant software. It is a Julia package created to help people “deal” with their simulations, simulation parameters, directories, scripts, existing simulations, project source code and in general their scientific projects. I will go into more detail below.

When announcing the first beta here on discourse, a lot of people became interested. Due to the interest, I thought it best to make a new post instead of continuing the discussion in the old post. Importantly, a lot of new people started contributing as well!

Since then, we’ve come a long way. Now the package has more features, is more stable, it has matured and it has been severely tested in several real world scientific projects. I use it in all my projects and I am happy for the comfort it provides.

I invite all researches to have a look; I promise you will find it helpful.
To get an idea of how DrWatson can help you, please have a look at the documentation linked above, or the Poster shown below.

Motivation

DrWatson is the result of some scientists being “fed up” with the hardship of handling scientific projects. We want to stop repeating the same processes for every project, stop screaming our lungs out in frustration, and make handling our scientific projects easier. Things like:

Urgh, I moved my folders and now my load commands don’t work anymore!
Do I have to produce a dataframe of my finished simulations AGAIN?!
PFfffff I am tired of typing savename = "w=$w_f=$f_x=$x.jld2, can’t I do it automatically?

are what we want to battle.

DrWatson is a scientific project assistant, not a data management system.

Why this can really help you

DrWatson was made with clear principles in mind, to make sure that is something simple to use, but also helpful. You can find more about this in the relevant documentation page.

For example, DrWatson has a functional design: most of the things you can do, you do them by calling one function. In addition, DrWatson pays heavy attention to reproducibility and offers a lot of easy-to-use functionality that can make your scientific projects 100% reproducible almost completely automatically.

Poster

The documentation is full of examples. Here I am displaying the Poster we’ve made for DrWatson, as it also encompasses a couple of examples:

Thankings

Here are the people that made this release possible:

And I’d also like to especially thank all the people that opened issues on GitHub!