1 Free Access to GitHub Co-Pilot
It's been amazing to see the interest in GitHub Copilot over the last 12 months. Our announcement about University staff and students getting free access to the tool through GitHub Education was certainly popular! If you want to upgrade your standard GitHub account to take advantage of GitHub Education benefits then see the article and get in touch!
2 Welcome to the GitHub Campus Program
In a similar vein to our top article, our announcement that all Schools, departments, institutes, and labs are now eligible to join our University GitHub Enterprise account was also very popular! Part of the attraction may be that you can keep your existing repositories, organisation, and GitHub account but now access enterprise-tier resources for free. Again see the article for details of how to sign up.
Our NVivo update announcement certainly attracted the attention of users across the University. It was only published in November but it's made no 3 in our top 10 list!
4 Detecting Text Written by AI
The debate about the use of AI will continue for many years to come. This article by two of our Research Software Engineers outlines a toolkit they have developed to identify AI generated content.
5 Version Control for Jupyter Notebooks Using Jupytext
In February, Research Software Engineer Jonny Taylor looked at ways of making Jupyter notebooks work better with version control software like Git.
6 Launch of new GIS, Mapping and Earth Observation Community
The announcement of a new Computation and Data in Research (CaDiR) community - GIS, Mapping and Earth Observation (GISMEO) community is no 6 in our list. GISMEO have ran several events since their official launch in July and the group continues to grow and attract more researchers.
7 Developing a Data Stewardship Community
Similarly the launch of the Data Stewardship community in the CaDiR Teams space was also popular. This article introduced the community and it's plans for the group including raising awareness of data stewardship across the University.
2024 has been a year of change for our Research Software Engineering (RSE) team. They have implemented “scrum” - a lightweight agile framework that helps people, teams and organisations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems. They have documented the team's progress and results of this implementation in several articles for the website but their first announcement has made it into our top 10.
9 Keeping Track of Dependencies
In July Donal Fellows tackled the issue of dependency tracking - an important but often overlooked task for long-lasting code. He explained the tools offered by GitHub to help you stay updated and avoid unsupported dependencies and vulnerabilities.
10 A Boost to Research Computing Power
And finally in September, a major upgrade to the University’s flagship High Performance Computing (HPC) service was announced - replacement cores, new cores and an OS upgrade!