Preparing your Code

In order to make the most out of our workshop, participants are encouraged to polish their code as much as possible beforehand. Through our discussions on Saturday, we will try to select one or more projects as the target of a coding sprint on Sunday. To enable others to effectively contribute to your project, try to follow best practices for open source software development. Below is a list of recommended practices for participating projects:

• Hosting on GitHub to facilitate issues tracking, pull requests, etc.
• Comprehensive test suite. Matt Rocklin's blog post on testing clearly explains the importance of testing to a scientific software project. Without tests, it is effectively impossible for others (or even you) to make significant contributions to your code.
• Continuous integration of testing via an online service such as Travis CI or circleci. The use of continuous integration really facilitates collaboration, making it clear when pull requests break existing functionality.
• Code coverage assesment. Coverage tells you which parts of your code are covered by your test suite. Coverage can be integrated with GitHub via services such as Coveralls and Codecov.
• Comprehensive documentation. Many modern python packages use Sphinx for the documentation, which integrates with http://readthedocs.org/ via GitHub hooks.
• Clear specification of dependencies. It's safe to assume that everyone will be using Anaconda for package management, so an environment.yml file is sufficient to specify your project's dependencies.

In addition to these general best practices, there are some specific issues related to analysis of GCM data. Most of us are aiming for somewhat universal tools (i.e. tools compatible with many different models), but in practice, we usually have a specific model we focus on and use for testing our code. Therefore, participants are highly encouraged to make some sample output from their favorite model (i.e. CAM, NEMO, MITgcm, etc.) available online in a publicly accessible location. These links will be shared with the group. If you don't have the ability to post sample data online, you can upload it to the LDEO anonymous incoming FTP server in the "aospy" directory.