Introduction to sharing your code

In the course so far you have learnt the building blocks of numerical modelling with Python and Jupyter Notebooks. With this you can write a surprising amount of useful code! However our efforts are rewarded many times over if we can share the code we have written. Sharing your code:

• clearly demonstrates your programming skills to future employers and/or supervisors
• enables other researchers to use your code, progressing science forwards
• establishes you an active participant in a particular domain or community of practice (people know who you are)

However it is unfortunately not enough to stick our Python code online and hope that other people will use them. Additional components we might need are:

• Tests to demonstrate that our code is reliable
• Documentation so that others understand how best to use the code
• Code that can be imported into other Python modules or ran from the command line
• Version control to track changes in our code and work collaboratively
• Websites to promote or document the code

These aspects are covered in this section of the course Getting it out there.

Please note that some of the tutorials in this section have been closeley adapted, with permission, from the Code Refinery software testing lesson and the Code Refinery documentation lesson.