Simple usage tutorial

[tiagofilipe12]

What do you think if we create a simple usage tutorial for some of the basic usages of tasks and orchestrators to README? We already have 4 examples but I think a walkthrough tutorial could help users to develop new pipelines.

[thejmazz]

Yes, this is definitely an important task if we wish to attract newcomers more easily.

I think a thorough walkthrough might include:

• go through a short pipeline by hand (should be copy-pastable commands but still get point across that files are written/read across multiple programs)
• show makefile/snakemake/nextflow and how they suffer when using multiple alternate params/programs for a pipeline step
• show how watermill overcomes that (i.e reusable tasks across pipelines, fork)

Maybe we should have a "why" tutorial (i.e. the points above) as well as a "getting started" one. The why one would go through pitfalls of other tools/practices which explains the motivation for watermill. The getting started one explains how the pipeline DAG works and how to create tasks using

• shell commands
• JS functions
• streams

[tiagofilipe12]

PR 55 should have handled the "getting started" tutorial as well as bionode-watermill-tutorial. Regarding the "why", we could put a link to your blog in README as well as the "getting started" tutorial link.