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Working Efficiently in the Quantopian IDE
Nate Wine
posted Jun 23, 2015

I'm relatively new to the community and the extent of my algo writing has been cloning others (thanks for sharing) and piecing code snippets together to create what I'm looking for.

One part of the coding experience I'm missing is how to track the dataframes or variables I'm working with. I am familiar with the print and log commands, are these the best way to see if your data manipulations are working as expected? I am used to programming in R Studio, and Matlab both of which have the ability to track objects as you work with them, can someone guide me on how to do that or think differently about the programming process.

Those of you that have written more complex algos, are you writing them in another IDE and then bringing it back to quantopian and modifying data feeds?

Any and all suggestions welcome

Thanks in advance

Nate

1 response
John Fawcett
Jun 24, 2015

Hi Nate,

Welcome to the Quantopian Community!

Our research environment provides the interactive experience you need for prototyping ideas and exploring data. It is based on the IPython Notebook, which has an interface similar to R-studio. Research is in limited beta, but we're granting access to (lucky) users every day, so the wait for access won't be long.

Meanwhile, in the IDE, you can set a breakpoint by clicking on a line number. When your run a backtest that hits the breakpoint, you can add watches to keep track of variables, or you can use the command prompt to explore any data, or execute any command.

happy coding,
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.