Getting Started with DM

[drphilmarshall]

I'm in the Tuesday WL/DM lunch at the SLAC 2016 collaboration meeting, with @wadawson @SimonKrughoff @TallJimbo @RobertLuptonTheGood @wmwv and others, and it seems that there is a need for some CI collaboration support, in the form of a "Getting Started with DM" page. This could (I think) be mostly annotated links, to things like:

• The latest documentation on getting set up (with recommendations from us)
• The Twinkles Cookbook, Will's GalSim analysis script, and other examples of DESC usage of DM code - and of course the DM team's own examples
• The Stack API doxygen system, or whatever DM replaces it with. @jonathansick can advise here I think
• The DM catalog schema and related notes
• The excellent community.lsst.org system, for asking questions about things that DESC members can't find in the pages linked from our Getting Started page

and probably others too.

Also, I noticed while looking at Perry's code that while the DM function names are very well-designed, I find myself wanting to click on their names and be shown the docstring etc. Is there an IDE and setup we can recommend that could enable this?

In the discussion:

We talked about how it was possible for Jim and Robert to give such high value feedback to Will on his deblending results (he showed plots, and the code that produced them). We agreed that a demo, in ipython notebook form, had enabled the interaction, and Jim pointed out that community.lsst.org enables the kind of stackoverflow Q&A that @rmjarvis strongly advocated. DESC demos are particularly valuable because they are specific.

Both Simon and @cwwalter mentioned that bitrot is an issue for demos - keeping them up to date is work, but Chris pointed out that having people (eg new students) actually run the demos is a good way of keeping them up to date.

Simon, Robert and Jim then provided some tips on detailed use of the LSST code - in terms of how to think about LSST objects, and some general code design notes (about how the objects work, in terms of consistent inputs/outputs). I wondered if there was a DM linter configuration we could point people at, to catch some potential pitfalls? Or do you just need to learn the DM conventions?

[jonathansick]

On community.lsst.org we should recommend that software support questions happen in the Support category. (It allows answers to be identified). In the near-term we'll also be launching an 'Ask LSST' category for the science collaborations to get official answers vetted from the Project Science Team and other project groups on questions of policy, LSST data, etc., that fall beyond the Data Management software usage.

We're also building a new software documentation infrastructure to replace Confluence and Doxygen, and one of the goals will be to test all demos in CI.

[wadawson]

@drphilmarshall asked me to upload the materials I presented during the lunch discussion.

Here are the slides I presented: RunningDMonGalSim.pdf

Here is the python script used to analyze the GalSim grid of blended pairs of galaxies: https://gist.github.com/wadawson/043f6a9d17aea661157c

And here is the corresponding ipython notebook where I used pyfits (note better options exist) to explore the resulting source catalog. https://gist.github.com/wadawson/8603f236da8c2f1f7d62

[heather999]

StackClub anyone?