Modify and run other people's research code in your browser
By Tim Head
Science makes progress by reusing results and building on them. For research software this is pretty hard (the people writing it often do not have the time to make slick installers like big libraries do). As a result there is not as much reuse as there could be. With everware we are changing this.
With everware you can edit and run code from a git repository with one click, in your browser. This significantly reduces the barrier to entry for trying out other people's code on a whim. As a result you will try out and decide to reuse other people's code more often, instead of rolling your own. Furthermore, if reuse is possible, reproducibility comes for free.
Interest in big discoveries like the Higgs boson is massive, imagine how many lay-people would love to be able to run (parts of) the analysis software that discovered the Higgs.
As the author of a research code all you have to do for your repository to be everware-ready is provide a Dockerfile that describes how to setup all the dependencies. Once this is done other's can launch your code from their browser and experiment with it.
Everware builds on github, docker and project jupyter. It started as a project at the CERN webfest 2015. You can find project everware on github.
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