volcan01010 / coding-in-the-open Goto Github PK

The following links may be of interest to attendees of the ONS Data Science Campus panel session.

Coding in the Open talk

This repository contains the slides and notes for a presentation that I did on coding in the open. The project page has links with more detail. There is also a link to a ~25 YouTube video. The talk covers many of the concepts discussed in the panel.

The conclusion is that rolling out Git training across your organisation is the secret to success.

• Software Carpentry Git Novice training: https://swcarpentry.github.io/git-novice/

One thing that helped senior managers see the benefit was to run a Project Management in GitLab course ("Dinner orders") that showed how issue tracking and collaboration tools worked. It runs in the web IDE, so no software installation or command-line Git knowledge is required. Users write text files to note their preference for dinner and the entries are compiled into a simple web-page via a CI pipeline. There is even a simple automated test to highlight the benefits that CI and testing bring. It would be nice to make a GitHub version one day.

The Society of Research Software Engineering also have useful resources.

British Geological Survey on GitHub

The British Geological Survey publishes our open source code to our GitHub area.

https://github.com/BritishGeologicalSurvey

ETL Helper is a Python library to simplify data transfer into and out of databases. It was released 4 years ago and is slowly picking up users. We plan to release v1.0 in the coming months.

• ETL Helper GitLab repo (up to 82 stars now): https://github.com/BritishGeologicalSurvey/etlhelper
• ETL Helper PyPI stats (500+ installs per day – I expect there are some inefficient software build pipelines out there!): https://pypistats.org/packages/etlhelper

We have also published papers relating to code that we have released:

• Journal of Open Source Software paper about PyVOLCANS tool that we released: https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.03649

Social media

I am @[email protected] on Mastodon/Fediverse, and @volcan01010 on Twitter (subsequently known as X), although I don't use it as much these days.

Other reading

Finally, two blog posts that I wrote that may be of interest to this group. They are about public sector software developer pay and about leaving academia to work in software.

• Why I went on strike over civil servant pay
• Careers outside academia for volcanologists