Software Carpentry at SciPy 2013

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Several members of Software Carpentry's vast network will be traveling to Austin, TX in June for SciPy 2013. We are especially excited that Katy Huff and Matt Davis will be teaching a tutorial titled “Version Control and Unit Testing for Scientific Software.” The tutorial is aimed at beginners and the only prerequisite experience will be basic use of Python and the shell. Matt and Katy will cover why testing and version control are good ideas for working scientists and show how to get started with each. Here's the tutorial abstract:

Writing software can be a frustrating process but developers have come up with ways to make it less stressful and error prone. Version control saves the history of your project and makes it easier for multiple people to participate in development. Unit testing and testing frameworks help ensure the correctness of your code and help you find errors by quickly executing and testing your entire code base. These tools can save you time and stress and are valuable to anyone writing software of any description.

This collaborative, hands-on tutorial will cover version control with Git plus writing and running unit tests in Python (and IPython!) using the nose testing framework. Attendees should be comfortable with the basics of Python and the command line but no experience with scientific Python is necessary.

If you're coming to SciPy and you'd like to meet with a representative of Software Carpentry to talk about helping us or organizing a bootcamp at your institution, please get in touch!