The Journal of Brief Ideas

Highly reusable tools and code for bioinformatics, focused on

Node.js/JavaScript to be "write once, run anywhere"
Node.js Streams and Events for scalable and reactive pipelines
CLI for easy integration with other tools and languages

The huge decrease in sequencing cost and consequent explosion of data is reinforcing the need for well tested and scalable tools in biology. It is also causing a boom in biological web services and databases that often require some data to be processed in the browser. Bionode provides bioinformatics tools written in Node.js. Bionode is an improvement on other bio* libraries because it can be run anywhere (browsers or servers), it is streamable, and it can be integrated with other projects and programming languages (each tools is a Node.js module but also comes with a CLI). Bionode tools follow the UNIX philosophy "do one thing and do it well".

All the development is public and transparent. The code is MIT licensed on GitHub, and discussions happen on Gitter and IRC (freenode #bionode). We welcome all kinds of contributions (code, ideas, etc) and we collaborate and integrate with existing projects, such as Dat (e.g., Mozfest 2014 workshop), BioJS (e.g., applied together for GSoC 2015), and CWL (e.g., brainstormed and hacked together at #biohack15 Japan). We apply the best practices from web development startups (e.g., testing, coverage, CI, etc) into developing scientific software. Our best practices have already inspired other projects. We have a small community but need more contributors.