Reference
Last updated on 2026-02-27 | Edit this page
Code
SkySim – the example software project developed in the first few lessons of this course
Reading
- The FAIR guiding principles for scientific data management and stewardship (Nature)
- Good enough practices in scientific computing (web page) (arxiv pdf)
- The research software engineer (RSE) association of Australia and New Zealand (link)
- Docstring conventions for python (PEP257)
- Project management methodologies (link)
- The agile manifesto
- The JIRA project management tool
- Python Code Quality: Tools & Best Practices (link)
- Version Control with Git (Software carpentry course)
- Issue tracking with GitHub (link)
- Git Feature Branch Workflow (link)
- The Model-view-controller software design pattern
- Python3 virtual environments
- Semantic versioning for software projects
- Guide to markdown formatting
- Guide to reStructuredText formatting
- The numpydoc docstring formatting style guide
- The sphinx python documentation generator
- GitHub actions introduction and documentation
Software / Services
- PyCharm (IDE): part of the JetBrains ecosystem. Free academic licence (1yr) if you sign up with your institutional email address.
- Visual Studio Code (VSCode) (IDE). An MS product but without all the usual garbage.
- Gitbash – a git client for windows
- Anaconda – a python environment management system.
- Cookiecutter a project templating system
- GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket version control repositories
- BASH reference manual
- The python package index (pypi)
- Read the docs – a free online documentation hosting service
- Travis-CI – a continuous integration tool
- Zenodo – free and open repository for data, software, papers, and more
- The Astronomy Source Code Library (ASCL)
- ORCiD – a persistent id to connect you to your research outputs