450102 SE COSMOS Topic Seminar: Open Source Software Development for Astronomy (2023W)

Open source software is a growing and influential component of modern astronomical research. It has produced some of the most highly cited papers in our field (e.g. astropy), and actively promotes the ideals of good scientific practice: openness, inclusivity and reproducibility. The goal of this course is to enable students to build their own open source software for astronomy research.

This will be a practical course where you will build a small software package from scratch. What will this software do? I'll provide a list of ideas for simple packages, or you can invent your own. Our focus, however, is not what the software specifically does, but rather what you need to do to build software that can be effectively shared, maintained and extended. You'll learn some fundamental concepts of open-source development as well as specific tools for version control, documentation, testing and packaging. The course will consist of demonstrations and hands-on sessions where you'll be given time, and guidance, to develop your software package. We'll also discuss broader issues such as gaining credit for working on software in academia, and building an active open-source community.

The course will focus on the Python programming language, and I recommended that participants have some basic, prior experience using Python. The tools we will use are either specific to Python, or will be demonstrated using examples in Python. Users of other programming languages are welcome to attend, however they should be prepared to find and use alternative tools.