 Right. Thank you everyone for joining. Sorry for the slightly so start. I think we're up and running now. I'd like to welcome Chris Hacker to the talk today. He's going to tell us all about the community survey that we do every year for Next Float and NF Core. There's already been a bit of noise about the results and everything and thank you to everyone who submitted, but Chris is going to delve in and give us some juicy insights. So looking forward to hearing about that. Chris is working at Secura, Secura Labs as a developer advocate for the Next Float and NF Core communities. So thank you very much for speaking Chris and I'll hand over to you. Thank you. Hopefully everyone can now see that. I'll see my slides. So yes, welcome. Thank you for having me. What I will be going through today is some of the results from the state of the workflow survey. The information I have taken from the survey has a real community flavor. So things relevant to Next Float and NF Core community in particular. As Phil already mentioned, there was a lot of sort of noise being made on the different channels on Twitter on Slack, asking people to fill this in. And it's really important that people do. And a part of this is because of the Chan Zuckerberg initiative grants that we've got, which are really there to help us increase sort of the reach of even the core of Next Float, making sure that people who do want to come along to the community can join and sort of get over the overheads of actually joining the community and making sure they understand what's going on. So as a part of that, of course, we have like the mentorship program, looking at the ambassador program. But there's a lot of initiatives that go on. And the survey is really a way of helping to measure how we're doing with things like that. So you might be asking another survey, didn't I just do one? Yes, absolutely. So this is a 2013, excuse me, 2023 community survey results. This is the third year of doing the survey. And from 2022 onwards, we started to ask sort of exit questions about the NF Core community in particular. This year was the largest survey to date. So there were 502 responses to the survey. This is up by 31% from 2022. So I think in 2022 we had sort of slightly over 300. And that was the 502 responses is more than double that of 2021. So each year we're getting more responses, which is fantastic. When we look at where people are coming from, so the region or the country that they, the respondents told us they live in 2022. We had 20 different countries that were listed from participants. And this year is 47. So you can see that we've got a much larger geographic reach. We're getting responses from from many, many more countries and we did more than double that of 2022. What you might also notice there is that most of the responses come from America and Europe. So you'll see that America is still number one with most responses coming from there. And then sort of Europe makes up the rest of the top six, especially in 2022. Some special mentions go out to India, Belgium, and I think it was Serbia who will make the top 16 for the first time. When we sort of look at the participants, excuse me, the survey participants, when you look at the age, we see that most people are younger than sort of 40. You'll see that 37% were under the age of 30. This is slightly up from 2022. So generally as trending a little bit younger. When we asked the participants of the survey what languages they were proficient in. So this is slightly different to the question that we asked in 2022, which was your sort of most proficient language. This time we've asked for all of the languages that people are proficient in. You'll see that English is still number one. So 99% of people who responded to the survey are proficient in English. But you can see there's a lot of other languages there that people are proficient as well. And this is really important information to help us decide how we can, when we're doing things like translating documentation or doing training in other languages. 99% is obviously just about everyone. But there is an important 1% near that they are proficient in English. So having information like this really helps us prioritize our efforts. When we looked at gender, you'll see that it is still predominantly males that responded to the survey who are next to our users. But the female representation did increase slightly. So it's up to 26%, which I think is about a 3% increase from 2022, as well as 1% of other who didn't identify as either male or female. When we look at the roles or people how to find their roles, most people define themselves as biophoticians, which is the same as previous years. It is down slightly from 2022, which is about 70%. And that sort of 3% was spread across an increase in PI managers, software engineers and data scientists. When we asked people what their sort of interests were when using NextFlow, most people said genomics, however transcriptomics, metagenomics and proteomics were still all quite prevalent. All of these are obviously within life sciences. But when we sort of dig into this other group, you'll see that there are many other sort of fields outside of the life sciences that are attracting, that are sort of being, next slide is being used for these as well. When we ask people how they define the industry that they belong to, most people said they came from academia, but you'll see that biotech startups and research institutions are still quite prevalent as well as healthcare and clinical. Moving on to how people, how long people have been using workflow managers and using NextFlow. When we looked at the years working with NextFlow, excuse me, working with workflows. So this is a little bit ambiguous in terms of is this just someone writing a bash script sort of strapping a few tools together, or have they been using other workflow managers for some amount of time. It's a bit hard to tell this apart, but you can see that people have been using workflows for some time, 8% for 10 years or more. When we asked how long you've been using NextFlow, you see that most people are very new to NextFlow with less than one year of experience. And of course a very few who have been with NextFlow from the start from six to 10 years, remembering that NextFlow turned 10 earlier this year. When we asked if you are using other workflow managers, you'll see that most people are using more than one workflow manager, which is expected and a little bit of variety definitely doesn't hurt. When we asked about your preferences for using NextFlow, most people are running the analysis using NextFlow themselves, how the others are running analysis for others, and others have written their own custom enhanced workflows as well. These questions weren't mutually exclusive, so you could tick multiple boxes for these. So you'll see that most people have sort of multiple roles when they're using NextFlow as well. Importantly, about 25%, 24% because it's been rounded down actually contribute to any of your pipelines, which is really important as well and really great to see that so many NextFlow users are joining the NFCOR community and giving back as well. When we asked people the workflows that they actually run, so not just developing but actually just running them, you'll see that most people are actually running NFCOR workflows, which is great. So all the workflows that are being developed as a part of NFCOR are getting used by a lot of NextFlow users. Of course, a lot of people are still developing their own workflows as well, as well as others. Some are using workflows that are developed by others in their group or other outsourced developers. This is a meme that was on the Slack channel today, which I thought was quite nice. So I'll give a shout out to James for making that as well. When we asked what you find useful when you are learning NextFlow, most people said the reference docs. This is a weighted average, so this graph can be a little bit misleading and difficult to understand. But roughly what's happening here with these weighted average graphs is that when people sort of respond positively saying it's very useful, it drags a score up, and if it was to be, it's not useful to be sort of below the line, near or below zero. In this case, when we actually looked at these numbers in more detail, 89% of people said they find the NextFlow docs very useful, and 73% find the NFCOR docs very useful as well. So it's really important that those NFCOR documents are sort of developed as well, and I think they are, which is really fantastic. If you actually looked at the rest of these sort of data points in detail, a lot of people actually said that they're sort of indifferent, so they weren't either useful or not useful, probably because they weren't using these particular methods for learning NextFlow. But from actually digging into the start a little bit more, you find that people found all of these resources very useful. It's just some people aren't using all of them. When we asked how you get help when you have a problem with NextFlow, most people are sort of reaching out on the NFCOR Slack. So that probably feeds into a lot of the people that responded to the survey potentially being NFCOR developers or trying to use the NFCOR pipeline. So that's what we've seen in the data already. And what's also interesting is that there's been this really huge uptake in people using the NextFlow Slack, which is about one year old now. So to see that being sort of quickly and widely adopted is really important. When we asked if you had attended a training before, 36% know but they would like to. Well 32% said yes, and it was one of the community trainings run by NFCOR. Earlier this year in March we had the NFCOR, NextFlow and NFCOR online community training and all this is still on YouTube along with all the training material. So if you do belong to that 36%, all the training material is there, whether if you're a part of that 32%, you might have attended this training already. But it's really great to see that those community training events being being used so heavily by the community and NextFlow users. So it was very nice. When we asked about how you launch your workflows, most people are launching from the command line, so 77% with a very small but important parts of the community using things like tower as well as other in-house platforms. When we asked the infrastructure that you're running this on, most people are doing on-prem clusters, but there is a sort of increasing migration to the cloud and that's something that we've seen over the last few years of the survey. People are quickly adopting cloud and we can sort of delve into those details in the survey blog post as well. When we asked what was important to you, so as an NextFlow user, as a developer, documentation was number one, so people find the documentation really important. But things like performance and scale, ease of installation, as well as the pipelines and data, portability, community adoption, all of these things were important. So this is another weighted average, so anything above the line is important. Where the people found that in particular the commercial support wasn't overly important, as well as the graphical user interface wasn't a priority for people. 63% of people reported that they felt frustrated with NextFlow, which I think is normal. When we actually looked at the responses, so this is actually the qualitative part of the response, people said things like the groovy language, debugging error messages, unclear documentation, having a large cache. All of these things come up regularly, we see this in the NextFlow Slack, but we do take this very seriously. It does sort of help us prioritize the features that need to be fixed or improved on as a part of NextFlow and NFCore. Looking at that in reverse, so when we asked what are the features people would like to see, they like to see NextFlow in other languages other than groovy. More obvious error messages, better documentation and a way of removing intermediate files. So this is basically the complete inverse of what people felt frustrated with, which makes a lot of sense. There are also a question of things like ability to optimize resources, submit Java arrays, more regular community trainings, is ability to write unit tests. And I just want to reinforce as well, is that like hear you, this is all really important feedback and the developers take this really seriously when they sort of think about what features they'll be adding to NextFlow. But I guess the bottom line and probably the most important thing is that 99% of people are satisfied with NextFlow. So people coming to use NextFlow are really happy. This is up from 98% in 2022. So this is a really fantastic result. This is a picture from a great Australian movie called The Castle. It's just the vibe of it as a summary, but NextFlow users are very satisfied. NextFlow has a growing user base with increased diversity, which is really important. NextFlow is experiencing rapid adoption and growth. We see that with a lot of NextFlow users having less than one year experience. The NFCOR community is especially valued, things like the community training and outreach that is done through the NFCOR Slack channel, for example, is incredibly important. And the survey has been really helpful and helped guide development of new features for NextFlow as well as NFCOR in the future. And that's in the presentation. And if there are any questions, are we happy to answer them? It's very much Chris. It's really good. Just leave open. Anyone feel free to unmute yourself or ask a question or drop a question into the chat and I can relay it. I liked all the memes, by the way, Chris, flashing up. I'm going to have to go back through the recording at half speeds to try and catch on the nose. Yeah, I should have to dwell on those. Same to break up all the green, I think. I can kick off maybe if you could go back a couple of slides to the things that people wanted to see. I thought it was quite interesting that like here, nearly all of these have got things which are being actively developed or coming up soon. Do you want to just mention a couple of these? Yeah, absolutely. So if anyone's actually ever dug around on the NextFlow GitHub, for example, there are a lot of branches that are actively developing some of these particular features, job arrays in particular, that's been requested for a while. And there's been some really good development on that recently. I'm not sure if there's sort of a date that that might be available, but that is a feature as an example that will be coming out in the future. Things like the more regular community training from a developer advocate perspective. We know how important the training is and there will be more training and more training resources in the near future. It's something that we're really prioritizing and see the value of and having available for the community as well. I'm not as up to date with what's happening with unit tests. I'm not sure if that's under active development or not. But in terms of optimizing resources, there are features through Tower, for example, that's already doing that. So if you're using Tower, you can you can sort of click the button there and have an optimized resource premise file created for you. So for unit tests, I was thinking about the NF test framework, which is which is a nice way to write unit tests for the next low pipelines. It's not not from a core next low team, it's a community tool, but it's being picked up and used in NF core. At the moment, we've got an NF test channel and NF core Slack, if you want to chat about it or just Google it, you'll find out that it's got really nice documentation. So if you want to optimize resources, one, I think that's not very well known, but if you're a next low tower user, once you've run a workflow on tower, then it should come up with a little button saying optimize resources and that will build a customized config file for you, based on what that run used, which should be optimized for future runs. It's not like it was still very much a work in progress. It's a preview feature that one. So the UI and stuff has some some improvement to be made still. But it might be useful for those of you interested in that as a feature. Right. Well, yeah, so there's a question just come in on the chat. A nice presentation please make an example custom config files for all possible tools using the pipeline. I'm not totally clear what that question means really, but because we've got any. I guess just expanding what Phil has mentioned with with the featuring tower. After you have executed a run and that's run the completion, you'll be given the option to go back and make this this custom config file, which would give you basically the resources that it will take into account that the tools will be used on your previous runs, and it'll come up with a new config file that will basically say hey look like you know you requested, you know 50 gigs of, you know, 50 CPUs for this big actually need to all this much memory or whatever us. And this will go through all the tools that are part of the pipeline for that. It's really nice feature I think if you go into the community showcase for tower that you'll be able to see that in action as well, which is probably the best way to sort of to see an image and get hands on as a part of it. Any more questions. You like to run first screen share the optimization thing. It's not very obvious. And I can just steal the screen share just super first. So this is tower. This is the testing action. Okay, let's go into verified pipelines. Let's go into existing runs here which have already gone. If I take one here you can see there's a button saying optimization available. Okay, this is a demo pipeline so it doesn't have anything in it easy as one process which was called say hello and this is saying it only needs one CP. You can imagine if this is a core pipeline that'd be like, you know, 100 different processes listed here with CPUs and memory for each one. You can manually copy that out stick that in a custom config file for the next run. Great. Right, thanks very much Chris. Thanks so much for being here and thank you everyone for joining. We'll see you for the next NF call by SliceDream.