In April, the ARCHER2 training team from EPCC at the University of Edinburgh, visited the University to deliver a three and a half day course on Intermediate Research Software Development, with support from Research IT.

This intensive, in-person course is designed for researchers who have been writing code for more than a year who want to learn to think more broadly about software development as an activity. They may be starting to write bigger pieces of code that need to be well organised and easy to read, or they want to work collaboratively with other researchers on a shared codebase, or they want to contribute to packages written by others. Some of our software engineers from Research IT also attended to level up their skills.

Around 15 people attended from Manchester and beyond, some visiting from other institutions for this useful course. They were mainly from science backgrounds but a range of disciplines and career levels were represented. These included PhD students in their first months to more senior staff, and digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs) as well as academics. This led to interesting discussions about tooling and applications across different research fields. It was good to get a different perspective and see how some of the “best practices” described in the course fit differently in different working environments, depending on how you work and who you work with.

The attendees found the course very useful, enjoying the interactivity of hands-on coding exercises and discussions as well as lecture-style content. In the first half day they were already learning new tools to apply to their own code, such as linters to check that your code is formatted neatly and virtual environments to help you work with different versions of libraries.

After the course they fed back that they particularly enjoyed the material being flexible. This meant that everyone got an overview of all the topics but could choose to do more challenging exercises on areas that they already knew. It also provided the opportunity for attendees to spend time reading more background on something that was new to them. The course notes are available online for attendees to support their learning after the course, and for you to learn at your own pace if you want to step up your software development!

I found the course really interesting, covering a broad range of topics that would be useful to researchers who write code. If you’d like to see more courses like this run at Manchester, please let us know by submitting a bespoke training request.