beta-Dec2025

What's Changed

• Renamed the course to "Building Better Research Software"
• Framed FAIR in the context of building better research software for reproducible research, see #185 but moved away from being a FAIR RS course
• Added various instructor notes, callouts, extra exercises, code examples and content (e.g. introducing GitHub issues early on)
• Updated started and ending code states and the accompanying software project
• Moved FAIR discussion and CI to extras

New Contributors

• @warrickball made their first contribution in #285
• @ndporter made their first contribution in #299
• @phillybroadbent made their first contribution in #311
• @katrinabrock made their first contribution in #315
• @steve-crouch made their first contribution in #336

Special Acknowledgements

Special thanks to @tobyhodges for initiating the change behind this release and @sstevens2 for her contributions to the material and organising and running the pilot workshop at UW-Wisconsin in August 2025 without the help of the lesson development team.

Full Changelog: beta-July2025...beta-Dec2025

Beta release July 2025

What's Changed

• Collapsed first three episodes into introduction, got learners to try to run the code early on
• Folded the FAIR reseach software discussion into the content on better reseach software, and move some FAIR parts to wrap up
• Cut down on Git content as learners are expected to be familiar with it
• Added better explanation on difficulties of using virtual environments and what issues learners may have but highlighting that this is still good practice
• Added fixing of the encoding issue with the code directly in the material and example software project
• Added start erand finisher code for all episodes by linking to branches in the example software project repo
• Unified the "bad" and "better" example software project into one repo
• Renamed the repository to better-research-software and handled redirections as much as possible
• Added alt text to all images and improved alt text content
• Various spelling fixes and text polishes
• Added various Issue templates

New Contributors

• @tobyhodges made their first contribution in #196
• @eroesch made their first contribution in #244

Acknowledgements

This improved version of the course has been made possible by the wonderful work of Toby Hodges, Sarah Stevens, Aman Goel, Etienne Roesch and Aleks Nenadic.

Full Changelog: beta-May-2025...beta-July2025

beta-May-2025

Update installation-instructions.md

alpha-July-2024

The alpha release of the course material - after pilot 1 of the course.