What will you learn?

This course aims to teach a core set of established, intermediate-level software development skills and best practices for working as part of a team in a research environment using Python as an example programming language. The core set of skills we teach is not a comprehensive set of all-encompassing skills but a selective set of tried-and-tested collaborative development skills that form a firm foundation for continuing your learning journey.

Who is this for?

A typical learner for this course may be someone who is working in a research environment, needs to write some code, and has gained basic software development skills either by self-learning or attending, e.g., a novice Software Carpentry Python course. They have been applying those skills in their domain of work by writing code for some time, e.g. half a year or more. However, their software development-related projects are now becoming larger and are involving more researchers and other stakeholders (e.g. users), for example:

Software is becoming more complex, and more collaborative development effort is needed to keep the software running.
Software is going further than just the small group developing and/or using the code – there are more users and an increasing need to add new features.
‘Technical debt’ is increasing with demands to add new functionality while ensuring previous development efforts remain functional and maintainable.
They now need intermediate software engineering skills to help them design more robust software code that goes beyond a few thrown-together proof-of-concept scripts, taking into consideration the lifecycle of software, writing software for stakeholders, team ethic and applying a process to understanding, designing, building, releasing, and maintaining software.

This workshop aims to cover a significant proportion of the material from a Carpentries Incubator course