Hey Everyone,
Today, we launched an alpha version of new Quantopian Documentation. The new documentation can be found at https://www.quantopian.com/docs or by navigating to Help —> Data Reference (this will drop you in the Data Reference section of the new docs).
Motivation
Over the years, the Quantopian platform has grown significantly. We are continuously adding more tools, features, data, and APIs that help you research and test quantitative investment strategies. With all these improvements, the breadth of the platform got to a point where we felt we could no longer effectively document everything in the format that existed on our help documentation page. As a result, we decided to re-write and reorganize the Quantopian documentation.
What’s New?
There are a lot of changes in the new documentation, the most significant of which are highlighted below.
Structure
The new documentation spans 6 sections:
- User Guide - Explanations of the tools and environments available on Quantopian.
- API Reference - Reference documentation for Quantopian’s APIs.
- Data Reference - Documentation of the pre-integrated datasets available on Quantopian (this section has been available for a few months now)
- Cookbook - Code examples and links to forum posts illustrating useful tips and tricks on Quantopian.
- Tutorials - Step-by-step walkthroughs covering the basics of Quantopian’s APIs (have been around for a few years).
- Lectures - Interactive notebooks teaching advanced topics in quantitative finance (have been around for a few years).
By dividing the documentation into sections, we can better organize the content in order to help you learn about the platform.
Cookbook
The cookbook is a brand new section that is designed to help example-driven learners. With example code snippets and links to high quality instructional/educational forum posts, the cookbook is a good place to look for solutions to problems that might be similar to or the same as whatever you are trying to do. The Cookbook is meant to be a constantly evolving resource. If you have example code that you think would benefit other community members, please let us know by emailing [email protected].
Search
The new documentation has a search feature (available in the upper left corner or by pressing /). The search function spans the User Guide, API Reference, Data Reference, and Cookbook. With the amount of content in the documentation, we figured a Search feature would make it easier to look up functions or topics without having to browse through the whole documentation.
More Content
The old documentation was missing several functions and tools that exist on Quantopian. We added content for several APIs that were missing documentation such as Alphalens, Pyfolio, and Pipeline (domains, dataset slicing, and missing built-in factors, among other things).
What’s Next?
The next step for the docs is to hear what you think about them. We’d love to hear what you think of the new structure, the new content, and anything else that you like or don’t like about the new documentation. Our plan is to leave the documentation in the ‘alpha’ stage for a few weeks. After that, we will promote the new documentation to be the official documentation and we will retire the old documentation. When the new documentation gets promoted, it will be clickable in the navigation bar at the top of the site.
As a reminder, the new documentation can be found at https://www.quantopian.com/docs or by navigating to Help —> Data Reference.
Acknowledgment
When we were designing the new documentation, we found Stripe's API Docs to be well suited for a technical audience and generally well designed. Many components of the new Quantopian docs were based on some of the ideas that Stripe implemented in their API Docs. Thank you, Stripe!
