In this News and Views episode, Chris Hakkaart and Marcel Ribeiro-Dantas discuss the hottest topics in the Nextflow world.

The Flux executor

• Flux is a job scheduler akin to Slurm, Sun Grid Engine, or similar but with some extra features and has been added to Nextflow as an executor.
• Flux was originally designed as an HPC job scheduler but is being extended it to more cloud environments and will be one to watch in the future.
• A great example of a feature that was added to Nextflow by the community nextflow-io/nextflow#3412.

Transcripts for bytesize seminars

• Video transcripts create a better user experience by increasing accessibility for users who are deaf or hard of hearing, improving audience comprehension, and enabling flexible viewing in sound-sensitive environments.
• Franziska Bonath has been working towards making the nf-core bytesize seminars more accessible by adding transcripts that can be used for subtitles to all videos.
• All transcripts for all bytesize seminars have now been made and are now under review.
• A massive thank you to Fran, to all those who have presented, and also those who have spent time reviewing the transcripts.

Improved error messaging

• Understanding error messages is a common challenge faced by the community.
• There has been a lot of work on improving Nextflow error messages.
  • Examples include improved messaging for errors created by passing a channel to a channel and operators that also work on folders and gave error messages that would refer to a file.
• An example of community feedback guiding development.

Upcoming events

• There’s a nf-core/bytesize talk on January 25th by Jasmin Frangenberg about the nf-core/funcscan pipeline.
  • A bioinformatics best-practice analysis pipeline for the screening of functional components of nucleotide sequences.
• The Nextflow / nf-core training is being held March 13-16.
• The nf-core hackathon is being held March 27-29.