Course overview

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What will this course cover?

• In what lesson-style is this course delivered?

Objectives

• Provide background information on course.

Overview

Programming as a researcher can be a very intimidating experience. It can feel as though your code isn’t “good enough” (as judged by some mysterious and opaque criteria), or that you’re not coding in the “right way”. The aim of this course is to help to address some of these concerns through an introduction to software engineering for researchers. Beyond just programming, software engineering is the practice and principle of writing software that is correct, sustainable and ready to share with colleagues and the wider research community.

Please, if you have not done so, yet, go through the setup instructions for the course.

Syllabus

• Techniques and tools to improve the readability and quality of your code
• Structuring your code in a modular fashion to promote reuse and future extension
• Testing frameworks and how to write tests

Learning Outcomes

On completion of this workshop you will be able to:

• Be confident in the quality of your code for collaboration and publication
• Apply appropriate quality assurance software tools to your code 
• Write tests to check the correctness of your code
• Understand how and where to access support from the Research Computing Service at Imperial College

Delivery of the course

Material will be delivered as a lecture with tasks following the Carpentries teaching style.

• The instructor will walk you through the theoretical material of the course, demonstrating the execution of the relevant code and instructions. You are highly encouraged to code along and execute the instructions at the same time.
• Throughout the lessons, there are yellow boxes highlighting particularly challenging or important concepts.
• There are also exercises in orange boxes. The instructor will give you time to try to do them yourself before going through the solution. This is often available in a folded part of the orange box, so you can check it at any time.
• When doing exercises, put a green sticker in your computer whenever you are done, or a pink/orange one if you need support. A helper will go to you.
• For online sessions, raise your hand if you are done with the exercise and write any questions or problems directly into the chat, so a helper can try to solve it.

Key Points

• Code along with the presenter.

• Ask questions!