Webinar: Writing Clean Scientific Software

Most scientists are largely self-taught as programmers. Even many of us who spend most of our time coding have never had formal training in writing software. This webinar is intended for students and scientists who have some experience writing code but who have had to learn mostly on their own. The webinar will describe tips and strategies on how to write readable, reusable, and maintainable code. These tips include writing short functions that do exactly one thing with no side-effects, and measuring the length of a variable name by the time needed to understand its meaning rather than by number of characters. The webinar will describe strategies for restructuring a complicated function into smaller and more manageable chunks, and provide tips on how to make the best use of comments and error messages. Overall, the webinar will embolden the Computational Science and Engineering (CS&E) community to think of code as communication.

Who should attend: Participation is free and open to the public, however registration is required for each event. This series is designed for HPC software developers who are seeking help in increasing their team’s productivity, as well as facility staff who interact extensively with users.

Schedule and format: The webinars will occur approximately monthly and last about one hour each. The webinars usually take place on a Wednesday at 1:00-2:00pm ET (but this can change due to speaker availability). Audience questions and discussion will be encouraged, however due to the number of participants, we use the webinar tool’s chat capability and a shared Google Doc to do this in written form.  Recordings of the webinars along with the presentation slides will be posted.

Registration: Registration is open now.

Notifications: If you’d like to receive announcements of upcoming webinars and other IDEAS organized events, and followups when recordings become available, please subscribe to our mailing list.

Organizers: These webinars have been organized by the IDEAS project in collaboration with the DOE/ASCR computing facilities (ALCF, NERSC, and OLCF), and the Exascale Computing Project (ECP).