Documentating software is part of the life of software engineers. But what kind of documentation do we need? In this episode I take you through three levels of documentation: the basic README and LICENSE files everyone should have, how to be good at writing git commit messages and using tools to turn your source code comments into browsable documentation.

Links

• https://www.sphinx-doc.org/
• https://pdoc.dev/docs/pdoc.html
  • https://docs.python.org/3/library/pydoc.html
• https://wiki.python.org/moin/DocumentationTools
• https://peps.python.org/pep-0287/ reStructuredText Docstring Format
• https://github.com/matiassingers/awesome-readme some README examples
  • https://dev.to/documatic/awesome-readme-examples-for-writing-better-readmes-3eh3
• https://www.gitkraken.com/learn/git/best-practices/git-commit-message GIT commit messaging
• https://www.warp.dev/terminus/git-commit-history Git Commit history

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

Testing your software is part of development. In this episode I talk about different types of testing, automated tests, legacy code etc. My guest is Stef Piatek from UCL who tells us how he approaches testing in his daily work.

Links

• https://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.html
• https://docs.pytest.org/
  • https://docs.pytest.org/en/7.1.x/how-to/monkeypatch.html PyTest Monkeypatch
• https://agiledata.org/essays/tdd.html test driven development TDD
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming
• https://joss.readthedocs.io/en/latest/review_criteria.html criteria for open source software reviews, which includes a section on testing
• https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/a-practical-guide-to-start-opensource-contributions/
• https://docs.github.com/en/actions GitHub Actions
• https://martinfowler.com Martin Fowler's great web site. Also look out for his book:
  • Working Effectively With Legacy Code - Michael Feathers, 2004, ISBN: 8601400968741

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

In this episode I'll be discussing data formats such as CSV, JSON and YAML. My guest is Nick Radcliffe from Stochastic Solutions and the Uni. Edinburgh. Nick's expertise is in data science and he has a lot to share about data, data formats and how to use them.

Links

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/njradcliffe/ Nick's LinkedIn profile
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values CSV formats
• https://www.json.org/json-en.html JSON
  • https://json-ld.org JSON for linked data
  • https://json-schema.org JSON schema
• https://yaml.org YAML
• https://parquet.apache.org Parquet by Apache
• https://hdfgroup.github.io/hdf5/ HDF5

Libraries

• https://numpy.org
• https://scipy.org
• https://scikit-learn.org/stable/
• http://www.tdda.info test driven data analysis

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

Python is one of the most widely used programming languages in research and science. How did it come to that. And what makes Python special? It's something I discuss with my guest in this episode, Robin Wilson, who also takes us through some of the less favourable or more complex aspects of the language.

Links

• http://www.rtwilson.com Robert Wilson
  • https://blog.rtwilson.com Robert's blog posts
• https://www.python.org
• https://anaconda.org Anaconda Python distribution
• https://jupyter.org all things Jupyter
• https://ipython.org iPython
• https://inference-review.com/article/the-origins-of-python
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

Python libraries for science

• https://numpy.org
• https://scipy.org
• https://pandas.pydata.org
• https://scikit-learn.org/stable/

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

In this episode we look into more essential Git commands, such as branching and merging. Branching and merging are key concepts that help you develop code or even text documents in a team. They help you maintain different versions of files and work on them independently.

Another element of collaborative working is provided by GitHub: the pull request. Pull request are a great way to do code reviews, which avoids introducing bugs and also learn from each other.

In my conversations Sam and Eirini talk about these key features and their experiences with it.

Links:

• https://git-scm.com/ Git again
• https://martinfowler.com/articles/branching-patterns.html Martin Fowler's blog post on branching patterns
• https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-pull-requests/proposing-changes-to-your-work-with-pull-requests/about-pull-requests explains the mechanics of pull requests in more detail
• https://github-pages.ucl.ac.uk/rsd-engineeringcourse/ Lecture notes

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

Peter Schmidt - the host of this podcast - interviews Sam Harrison, an environmental modeller at the UK Centre for ecology and hydrology. Is it version control important for his research? what tool does he use? How he learn it? Links and transcript available in the show notes.

About Sam

• https://www.ceh.ac.uk/staff/samuel-harrison
• https://www.ceh.ac.uk/

About Git

• https://git-scm.com/
• https://github.com/git/git/
  • https://github.com/git/git/tree/v0.99 (almost) first version of Git from 2005
• https://github-pages.ucl.ac.uk/rsd-engineeringcourse/ Lecture notes

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

In this last episode of the companion podcast for the C++ course at UCL, I invited both Klaus Iglberger and Marc Hartung (Dive, Berlin) to go through some aspects of parallel computing. But also to look a little bit ahead of what's in store for C++ in future standards. And how the language may help you in your career.

Links:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NReDubvNjRg&list=PLY_qIufNHc2-Dk9IVNtgoF4uhKRszjJPz Cpp Conference (Cpp Con) Back to basics YouTube 2023
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRGRTvfOxb4&list=PLY_qIufNHc2950NLOeUFuO0DsqjAZ6cG0 Cpp Conference (Cpp Con) Back to basics YouTube 2024
• https://cppcast.com/ A podcast dedicated to all things C++
• https://adspthepodcast.com/ ADSP (Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs) Podcast
• https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/c-software-design/9781098113155/ Klaus Iglberger's book on "C++ Software Design"
• https://blogs.fau.de/hager/hpc-book HPC book with lots of material on parallel computing Georg Hager, Gerhard Wellein

I'd like to thank UCL and the UCL Advanced Research Computing Centre for their support and creating this show. In particular David Perez-Suarez, Michael McLeod and Mashy Green.

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

Marc Hartung and I will discuss distributed memory in parallel computing in this episode, with tools like OpenMPI. We also discuss some of the hardware aspects around HPC systems and how shared and distributed memory computations differ.

Links:

• https://www.open-mpi.org OpenMPI homepage
  • https://docs.open-mpi.org/ the docs for OpenMPI
• https://www.mpi-forum.org The MPI Forum (who write the MPI standard)
• http://openshmem.org/site/ OpenSHMEM
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_memory summary page on distributed memory
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfiniBand InfiniBand network solution
• https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/01/31/crays-slingshot-interconnect-is-at-the-heart-of-hpes-hpc-and-ai-ambitions/ Slingshot network solution
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitioned_global_address_space
• https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/von-Neumann-bottleneck the bottleneck named after John von Neumann
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point_operations_per_second overview of FLOPS (floating point operations per second)
• https://www.openmp.org/wp-content/uploads/HybridPP_Slides.pdf OpenMP and OpenMPI working together in a hybrid solution
• https://blogs.fau.de/hager/hpc-book Georg Hager/Gerhard Wellein book on HPC for scientists and engineers

Don't be shy - say Hi

This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt