Hi Matti, (am changing the subject line to separate a subtopic).
Is there a forum where we could explore the larger question around best practices in helping projects and teams keep their software up-to-date through rolling updates, test suites, and documentation? A few things come to mind:
- developing a culture of version control and tests when creating software, even if it is grad students racing towards their degrees
- freezing environments in images, which is a whole discipline unto itself, and needed for reproducible science
- offloading the task of maintaining computing environments using things like Jupyter Hub or other web-based services
t's a great point, thanks for starting the conversation! I've asked around (mostly undergrad science students, not comp sci). A common theme is that - it'd be great to have some short best practices how-tos would be helpful, especially for testing, version control and containerization - there's lots of info, and it's overwhelming (hence a short how-to to get started) - the vast majority of learning material on the internet seems off-base and is difficult to connect to the R&D / research projects students are dealing with. Anecdotally, when I was starting (non comp sci background here), one of the eye openers for me was Nelle V's git tutorial at EuroScipy. There are several tutorials from the SciPy community (broadly defined), but they are scattered and not very easy to find (e.g. Matthew Brett's https://matthew-brett.github.io/pydagogue, I'm sure there are others) Just throwing it out there: I wonder if SciPy lecture notes (https://scipy-lectures.org/) could be a place for these sorts of tutorials. Cheers, Evgeni