The Software Sustainability Institute and LSST:UK are jointly delivering a workshop to pilot the new course on Intermediate Python Software Skills for the members of the LSST:UK community from 6 - 10 December 2021.

This course is aimed at learners who are working in academic research and have gained some basic software development skills, either by self-learning or attending for example a novice Software Carpentry course (shell, Python, Git). However, they increasingly require more intermediate computational skills for their work as their software development-related projects are facing new challenges, such as:

• software is becoming more complex and more team development effort is needed to keep the software running.
• software is going further than just the group developing the code - there are more stakeholders and an increasing need to add new features and support collaborations with others.
• increased demands to add new functionality while ensuring previous development efforts remain functional and maintainable.

The course will cover topics such as:

• using various tools and techniques for software development in a typical collaborative code development cycle.
• setting up a test framework and writing tests to verify the correct behaviour of the code, and automating and scaling up testing with Continuous Integration (CI).
• different software design paradigms to understand different ways of thinking about and structuring the code.
• preparing and releasing software for reuse by others.
• managing software improvements through feedback using agile techniques.

Please refer to the workshop website for a detailed schedule and training materials that will be covered. The workshop is for the members of the LSST:UK community and you will need a special code to register - for details get in touch with Terry Sloan.