Program

The preliminary schedule for this program is available here.

About

What this workshop is => This will be a week-long workshop and unconference, where we will discuss and learn about the finer details of managing and contributing to open source software projects in astronomy. This program aims to:

• build a network of astronomers who participate in the open source community, through contributions including code, documentation, support, management, and many other aspects of this ecosystem,
• identify ways that we, as a community, can promote and support astronomical software development, and the people who do it, and
• discuss some high-level technical topics specific to scientific software development (e.g. development workflows/infrastructure, testing best practices, academic credit, etc.).

Serious code development experience is not a prerequisite for this meeting, and we value the perspectives of scientific software developers, managers, users, advocates, and all other members of this community. We do not expect all participants to be expert coders, and we encourage you to apply to the workshop regardless of your coding experience level.

What this workshop isn’t => This workshop is not going to focus on specific tools, programming languages, or introductory software development topics. There are detailed software development workshops, courses, and resources out there that we don’t want to recreate (we have included a list of some examples at the end of this message), so this unconference is not meant to be a place to learn about how to use computing tools (e.g. git, Python, or even topics in high-performance or GPU computing). Similarly, we’re not going to focus on a specific branch of modeling or technique (e.g. “big data,” machine learning, Gaussian Processes).

The program => This workshop will feature lectures and/or facilitated thematic discussions in the mornings, followed by afternoons of unstructured collaboration/discussion/co-working time. The daily topics, speakers, and facilitators are yet to be determined, but they will fall into the broad set of topics discussed above. The afternoons will be participant-driven, so you will have the opportunity to lead and join discussions on topics of your choosing, or try implementing ideas discussed in the morning sessions. We expect that all participants will actively participate in these hands-on sessions to the full extent that makes sense for them.

Logistics

This workshop will be held in person at the Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City, May 16–20, 2022.

Please don’t hesitate to contact Dan Foreman-Mackey, the chair of the organizing committee, with any comments, questions, or suggestions!

Organizing committee

• Kelle Cruz
• Dan Foreman-Mackey (chair)
• Christina Hedges
• Rodrigo Luger
• Adrian Price-Whelan

Other workshops, courses, and resources

As discussed above, this workshop is not designed to cover all topics in scientific software development. Below we include a list of other workshops and resources that may also be of interest. You are encouraged to open a pull request at astrodatagroup/code if you have other resources to recommend.

Workshops:

• The Carpentries
• Python in Astronomy
• Code/Astro
• AstroHackWeek
• SciPy annual conference (see the tutorials)

Books and online resources:

• Introduction to scientific computing (Python)
• OpenAstronomy Software Packaging Guide (Python)
• Astropy Tutorials and Guides
• PyData lectures and tutorials

Organizations:

• US Research Software Engineer Association