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General Update on Quantopian OSS
John Fawcett
posted Jan 23, 2020

Hi,

Here at Quantopian, we love the community that has formed around our open source software (OSS) projects. As our OSS has found its way into personal and professional uses, the demand for maintenance has increased. This is the proverbial good problem for OSS -- popularity creates maintenance work and even though the software is free in every sense of the word, OSS users are sometimes more demanding than paying customers.

We believe quant finance needs OSS standards for critical functions like factor analysis, backtesting, and metric calculation. So, one of our 2020 resolutions is to adapt to the higher maintenance demands on our popular projects!

First, a little history. In the past, we have tried to explicitly prioritize individual OSS maintenance tasks against our internal roadmap. Because we were comparing support/maintenance of OSS with projects that generate revenue, we were consistently de-prioritizing OSS work. The product and engineering team recognized that this process was leading us toward a tragedy of the commons. As the primary maintainers, we needed to find a better way to invest effort in our projects.

Our product and engineering team came up with a new approach: weekly time allocated for OSS work. This time is booked into our engineering plan, but independent of our normal feature prioritization process. The idea is to protect this time for healthy maintenance of our OSS projects.

To start, we have been working through issue tracking/communication backlog. Hopefully, you have noticed an uptick in this basic communication! Our short-term goal is to get a firm handle on the state of the projects (we will be splitting our time across Zipline, Alphalens, Qgrid, and the rest of our OSS projects).

We aim to be more timely and more clear about requests to our OSS projects that we do not consider high priority and do not plan to support ourselves or through community PRs. We will do our best to be clear about our reasoning and we welcome your feedback.

Besides priority, we will also consider whether we can practically accept a community contribution for a high priority OSS project goal. We see a split where some goals are easily separable and therefore feasible/convenient for us to accept contributions. We will try to communicate early and clearly whether we can accept community contributions for a particular goal.

Once we have a handle on backlog issues, we will increasingly focus on moving the projects forward. An example is adding support for the most recent Python versions in Zipline. We have shipped that work for the Quantopian platform, and we look forward to bringing it to Zipline.

We want to have a more clear framework for work that we feel we need to do at Quantopian and work that is a match for community contributions. Going forward, we think the key criteria for a healthy community contribution is work that is cleanly separable and independent from Zipline’s installed base and Quantopian’s internal dependencies. Here’s a discussion on a few maintenance priorities for Zipline that illustrates our thinking.

Here’s to more OSS in 2020!

Thanks,
fawce

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The material on this website is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell, a solicitation to buy, or a recommendation or endorsement for any security or strategy, nor does it constitute an offer to provide investment advisory services by Quantopian. In addition, the material offers no opinion with respect to the suitability of any security or specific investment. No information contained herein should be regarded as a suggestion to engage in or refrain from any investment-related course of action as none of Quantopian nor any of its affiliates is undertaking to provide investment advice, act as an adviser to any plan or entity subject to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, as amended, individual retirement account or individual retirement annuity, or give advice in a fiduciary capacity with respect to the materials presented herein. If you are an individual retirement or other investor, contact your financial advisor or other fiduciary unrelated to Quantopian about whether any given investment idea, strategy, product or service described herein may be appropriate for your circumstances. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal. Quantopian makes no guarantees as to the accuracy or completeness of the views expressed in the website. The views are subject to change, and may have become unreliable for various reasons, including changes in market conditions or economic circumstances.

1 response
Viridian Hawk
Jan 24, 2020

Any more news on the 3rd-party hedge fund roll-out?

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The material on this website is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell, a solicitation to buy, or a recommendation or endorsement for any security or strategy, nor does it constitute an offer to provide investment advisory services by Quantopian.

In addition, the material offers no opinion with respect to the suitability of any security or specific investment. No information contained herein should be regarded as a suggestion to engage in or refrain from any investment-related course of action as none of Quantopian nor any of its affiliates is undertaking to provide investment advice, act as an adviser to any plan or entity subject to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, as amended, individual retirement account or individual retirement annuity, or give advice in a fiduciary capacity with respect to the materials presented herein. If you are an individual retirement or other investor, contact your financial advisor or other fiduciary unrelated to Quantopian about whether any given investment idea, strategy, product or service described herein may be appropriate for your circumstances. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal. Quantopian makes no guarantees as to the accuracy or completeness of the views expressed in the website. The views are subject to change, and may have become unreliable for various reasons, including changes in market conditions or economic circumstances.