Software Carpentry

Southampton RSG

0. Introduction

Before We Start

Make sure you have an account at github.com
Go to, or make, a climate-analysis repo
Open VS Code or a text editor
e.g. Atom, Sublime Text, Notepad++, BBEdit

1. What Is Academic Software?

The Large

Database creation & management
HPC simulation codes
Machine learning pipelines
OSes & drivers

The Small

Collections of scripts
Cleaning data
Plotting figures
Toy models

The Commonalities

May not be true for Engineering/CompSci!
Instrumental- not a goal in itself
Experimental- may not have a clear spec
Small teams

The Issues

Paperware
Unplanned
Undocumented
Unmaintainable
Can’t onboard people
Disposable

Serious Problems

Software Is Science
Reproducibility
Wasted effort
Harms collaboration

2. How Do We Avoid This

Forward-thinking

Assume people will try to understand
Assume people will try to reproduce
Make it as easy as possible

Understanding

Write clear code
Document your code
Document your development process
Document your code’s limitations

Reproducibility

Track versions of your code
Specify versions used in your papers
Cite your code

Software Carpentry Southampton RSG