On Wednesday I’m going to present my scientific software documentation project, One Good Tutorial , as part of the IDEAS HPC Best Practices webinar series . It’ll take place at 1 PM US Eastern time. Register to attend if you’re able to watch it live, but you can always watch a recording later if you’re not. My slides are attached to this post. Here are the slides if you want to check them out. I…
I’m delighted to announce that a beta-testing version of my scientific software documentation resource, One Good Tutorial , is ready for your feedback! Check it out at onegoodtutorial.org . (You might have noticed that my blogging pace has fallen off a cliff. Having a kid will do that to you! I aspire to ramp things back up, but it’ll probably be a little while …) One Good Tutorial is the guide…
The past few posts have been about prep work for my BSSw project : interviews and a survey of tools . After all this throat-clearing, I’m ready to sketch out the resource that I’m actually planning to create! I plan to call it One Good Tutorial . The target audience will be, of course, developers of small-to-medium scientific software projects. The centerpiece of the project will be a checklist:…
Last week I presented some of my takeaways stemming from a small set of interviews with researchers about scientific software documentation. This week, I’m reporting out the results of a survey and review of tools for documenting research software: The State of The Doc Tools , 2025. An early, big-picture finding: as a result of both my interviews and my survey, I’ve concluded that it’s really…
As part of my BSSw Fellowship project on scientific software documentation, I’ve conducted free-form interviews with some of my colleagues to try to learn a little about how working scientists are approaching research software documentation in the year 2025. In this post I’ll report my findings. But first, some disclaimers. I’m describing an extremely modest, qualitative undertaking. While I very…
At long last, the first data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory are starting to become public! Here at the Minor Planet Center we were not only watching last week’s Rubin “First Look” event — we had some work to do too. Asteroid-hunting and planetary defense have always been a major piece of Rubin’s science case. When it hits full steam, Rubin will increase the rate of observations coming into the…
I’m pleased to report that CASA 6 is now available in conda-forge ! CASA is a software suite for processing radio astronomy data from telescopes such as the Very Large Array , ALMA , and more. The availability includes the casatools and casatasks Python packages but not the full suite of CASA end-user applications. Just run: $ conda install casatasks or the equivalent command in a Python…
Service blogging today! For a while I’ve been pondering if it would be possible to use the GitHub Packages service to host “generic” files: namely, arbitrary binary artifacts that aren’t necessarily NPM packages, Docker images, etc. Motivated by some of the my current MPC projects, I sat down this week to look into the topic more deeply than I have before. Lo and behold, you can do this! And it…
The MPC is hiring! We have two positions currently open — one Astronomer and one IT Specialist (i.e., software developer). Both applications close on March 31st. You should check out the links above for the formal descriptions of the two roles. Less formally, I’d say that there’s a wide variety of work and science that happens at the MPC and there are many different ways that a well-qualified…
Yikes, it’s been hard to keep up a weekly posting schedule lately. I’m hoping to ramp that back up, though — I’ve just been occupied the past couple of weeks with some nitty-gritty database performance work. A couple of weeks ago we migrated the MPC’s primary production database from physical hardware to a virtual machine running our “Borg” cluster, which runs the XCP-ng / Xen Orchestra…