Event Details

The Research Software Forum is a series of short talks and mini-workshops on anything related to Research Software...

The Research Software Forum is a series of short talks and mini-workshops on anything related to Research Software. Talks can cover techniques researchers use, tools they have found useful, or how they use software and hardware as part of their research. These are designed to be more informal than formal training, and the talks are more of a starting point for discussions and networking.

We have two talks for this Forum, each 15 minutes with time for discussion and questions afterwards.

Improving Your Productivity by Ctrl-Using Alt-Keyboard Esc-Shortcuts - by Barry Rowlingson, Research Fellow (CHICAS)

This short talk will try and influence you to do away with your mouse (other pointing devices are available) and keep your hands on the keyboard. I'll introduce the basics and give you some tips to get you up to power user level at your own pace. The techniques can be used in a wide range of applications and I'll illustrate in environments like Jupyter Lab, VS Code, and of course EMACS.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness: how to tidy your Python code automatically - by Chris Jewell, Professor in Statistics Python is a great language for clean, neat, and expressive code. However when in a hurry we can still write rambling, hard-to-interpret code which hinders our ability to read each other's programs, and can lead to difficulty in detecting bugs. The PEP8 standard tries to address this by proposing rules for improving the quality of code. However, adhering to the rules can be difficult and time-consuming. Fortunately, there is a better way: "linting", or the process of automating code quality checking, is here to help. In this "howto" talk, I'll review two linting packages -- flake8 and black -- and show you how to use them to detect common code quality issues and automatically format your code in a pretty way.

Location: Digital Scholarship Lab in the Library