scope

[lheagy]

There are many excellent resources already out there (e.g. Software Carpentry), and we don't want to be re-inventing the wheel. However, it would be useful to have a place that provides links to resources and a bit of a preview of why you might use a given resource.

What do folks think of assembling a list similar in style to the awesome open geoscience list, but scoped for best practices. Some of the headings could include:

• Git and Versioning
• Testing
• Continuous integration
• Documentation
• Managing Environments
• Packaging and Distributing Code
  • Python
  • Julia
  • ...
• Archiving code (e.g. zenodo)
• Citing code

Please chime-in with other ideas for topics!

[rabernat]

Pangeo developed a list of best practices here: http://pangeo.io/packages.html#guidelines-for-new-packages. We would be happy to offload this to an upstream, AGU-sponsored group.

Beyond the standard stuff like tests and documentation, we tried to address some of the more gray-area questions like "how big should a package be?" and "how should it operate with other packages?" Although difficult questions, they are particularly important for AGU users. Often people come in wanting to create one mega-package to rule them all. The real challenge we have in geoscience is figuring out what are the common needs across sub-disciplines (e.g. labeled multi-dimensional arrays) vs. the particular needs of smaller groups (e.g. the ocean thermodynamic equation of state).

[danielskatz]

Another topic is:

• publishing software papers (e.g. JOSS)

Also, does CIG have material that could be used here?

[gassmoeller]

I think this is an issue that also came up during the town hall meeting at last AGU. A list of links to best practices could be useful (not sure if it is better to have a list to existing lists, or try to compile one that is applicable to all geoscience projects).
CIG has a number of resources here and is also happy to distribute them: https://geodynamics.org/cig/dev/