Andrew Gait and Nigel Green from our Research Software Engineering team have launched a new CaDiR channel for researchers and staff who use Python. It's open to people of all abilities and makes an excellent follow-on for those who have attended our Python training courses. Find out more about their plans for the community.

Dependency tracking is one of the tasks that it is easy to forget to do, and yet is important for code of any lasting significance. GitHub has tools available to help you keep up to date to avoid unsupported dependencies and vulnerabilities. Anyone producing code at the University is encouraged to take advantage of these tools so problems due to upstream code are addressed more rapidly.

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.

Apply now to learn about best practices in software development – especially if you already code but Virtual Environments, Testing, and Continuous Integration seem like advanced techniques to you.

Over the last 12 months, the Research Application Support team has worked on over 350 support tickets from researchers across the University. Many are very much business as usual but some of them can be quite tricky or fun to work on.

In May Adrian Harwood, Head of Research Software Engineering (RSE), posted the first part of his update on the latest improvements to the RSE department. In his second part he summarises the more external facing improvements delivered by the RSE Levelling-Up Programme.

At the end of March, members of our Research Software Engineering (RSE) team ran a Carpentries-style training course for researchers in the environmental sciences. The training took place over five days, and introduced the researchers to intermediate-level software development skills and practices.

Earlier last month, members of our Research Software Engineering team ran a Carpentries-style training for the Henry Royce Institute. The training took place over two days, where day one covered Introduction to Python and day two covered Data Analysis and Visualization.

We are currently gauging interest for a potential NVidia training course and we need your feedback!

The pandemic has brought many challenges, not least conducting training.  Our Training team have recently used Amazon Service Workbench to teach Python remotely online.

Mark Lundie, Research Infrastructure Engineer in Research IT, helped Dave Topping’s research group to use Julia on the CSF – a move that could benefit many researchers across the University.

With the campus in lockdown, we have moved some of our courses online but how does this work in practice? Is it possible to have the same level of interaction as you do in a classroom? Douglas Lowe tells of his experience.