Best Practices on Development Workshop

Yesterday I held a workshop at Science For Life Laboratory (SciLife) which I called “Best Practices on Development”.

The aim of this workshop was to show the attendants (scientists on its majority) how to develop software in a better way. On these years working on scientific environments, I have seen quite a big tendency on not giving the deserved importance to software quality, prioritizing only obtaining the desired results. This blog post from Chris Parr describes this situation quite well.

IMHO we are doing a good job in the production team at SciLife, all our code is publicly available on GitHub, we have some of our software integrated in Travis-CI, and we have a good collaborative workflow (Trello, Pull Requests, GH Issues, etc.). For this reason, I decided that it would be good to share these good practices and experience with the rest of the scientists at SciLife, as well as everyone who wanted to attend.

Here you can find all the material of the workshop. On that repository, you can find:

• A lot of material on Git & GitHub, Python, styling, testing and debugging
• Two branches called exercises and solutions.
• The slides I used (which are not very informative as it was quite interactive :-P)

I tried to structure the workshop so that the people could solve this problem step by step:

Is your first day, and they told you that you have to find a bug in a piece of software, fix it, document it, and make sure that this doesn’t happen again (a.k.a write tests!)

The experience was awesome, people were very collaborative, even discovering some non-intentioned bugs in my code due to last minutes changes (yep, practice what you preach…). Even the mixture of background and levels, I am very satisfied about how the people followed the workshop, all the effort put on it was definitely worth it.

Just hopping that this derives on a better development.

And needless to say, you’re free to re-use whatever you want from my repository!