The second meeting of the Manchester Research Software community featured two presentations: the first on the use of agile practices in research software; and one on the recently launched University instance of GitHub Enterprise. The presentations are now available to the University research community.

Jupyter notebooks are a widely used tool for coding in Python and Julia, but they don't always work well with version control software like Git. Research Software Engineer Jonny Taylor investigates a solution.

Schools, departments, institutes, and labs are all now eligible to join our University GitHub Enterprise account. You can keep your existing repositories, organisation, and GitHub account but you can now access enterprise-tier resources for free! Adrian Harwood, Head of Research Software Engineering, explains how.

Learn more about using Github repositories for starting new projects from two of our Research Software Engineers Douglas Lowe and Robin Long.

Git is becoming a common tool, widely used for organising code, recording developments, etc. Often, we want to reuse code from one project for another, or to have a standard layout or template that can be used for similar projects. Here Robin Long and Douglas Lowe, from the RSE team, will detail the features available in git and github for making your life easier with this.

This month we have a bumper collection of top tips from our Research Software Engineers (RSEs)! They are passing on a selection of good practice tips which they advise all researchers who develop or write software, to consider adopting.

Research IT staff will be teaching and assisting on a Software Carpentry Workshop in May which aims to help researchers get their work done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic research computing skills. The workshop is free to post-graduate students and employees of the University of Manchester.

Earlier this month, Research IT provided training for the University's Regenerative Medicine Centre for Doctoral Training. The training was arranged by the Software Sustainability Institute, and was a two day Software Carpentry workshop. The instructors were Mike Jackson from EPCC at the University of Edinburgh and David Mawdsley from Research IT.

Research IT has arranged for the latest version of Git (v.2.10.2) to be available on all staff managed desktops. Git is a version control system that allows software developers to have complete control and management of their code development ensuring that you can easily revert back to previous versions, share your code and collaborate with others.

Research IT will be running a full-day course providing an intensive hands-on introduction to version control using Git on the 8^th November 2016.

Research IT will be running a new full-day course providing an intensive hands-on introduction to version control using Git on Wednesday 6th July 2016.

The course is aimed at those who have no or little experience of version control. It will cover:

• What version control is;
• The main benefits of using version control;
• How to set up and work with a local repository;
• How to work with remote repositories using GitHub;
• Topics such as branching, resolving conflicts, merging and rebasing;
• Working collaboratively on one repository.