Call for participation: task force to work on Software development guidelines/best practices

[sanjayankur31]

Please see this ticket for more information on the task:

https://github.com/OCNS/SoftwareWG/issues/113

We would like to set up a task force to deliver the first version of these software development guidelines/best practices. Please comment on this ticket if you would like to join the task force.

[dissagaliyeva]

Hi Ankur! I'd like to join :)

[cmahapatra97]

Hi Ankur, I am interested in joining the task force. I will volunteer a couple of hours per week on the activities of the task force. Best, Chitaranjan

[sanjayankur31]

Thanks @dissagaliyeva , @cmahapatra97 . Sounds great. We'll leave this open for a week or two to allow folks more time to decide, and then the task forces can start their work.

[heitorsf]

Hello, I would like to join this task force. I can volunteer a couple of hours per week, too. Cheers, Heitor

[rahafai]

Hi Ankur,

I'm also interested in joining the task force.

[mstimberg]

I'd be happy to get involved as well :tada:

[sanjayankur31]

I'd like to be involved in this one as well :100:

[mandarmp]

Hello, I would like to get involved in it as well.

[lab-catrina]

Hi, I would like to help

[shayanshafquat]

Hi Ankur,

I would like to get involved. I can volunteer a couple of hours per week.

Regards, Shayan Shafquat

On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 3:41 AM lab-catrina @.***> wrote:

Hi, I would like to help

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[anilbey]

I'm also interested in participating.

[sanjayankur31]

Thanks folks. We'll wait till the end of this week, 23 October, for more people to join, and then proceed.

I see we've got >10 folks here, but only 3 in #117 for the quick resources to help users pick simulation tools. Would some folks like to perhaps work on #117 instead? That's something that I'd perhaps consider slightly more important in the short-term, and I'd also expect a deliverable there earlier than for the guidelines here.

[sanjayankur31]

Thanks for all your interest @mstimberg @anilbey @lab-catrina @shayan823 @mandarmp @rahafai @heitorsf @cmahapatra97 @dissagaliyeva

Please fill out this whenisgood as soon as possible, and latest by the end of this week (28th October) so we can have an initial meeting next week to get things started:

http://whenisgood.net/qp7mnk5

Please remember to select your time zone when filling it in. And, please select all the slots that work for you. The more slots we all select, the more likely we are able to find one that works for us all.

[sanjayankur31]

Hi folks, just a reminder. Please fill in the whenisgood if you haven't yet:

http://whenisgood.net/qp7mnk5

[sanjayankur31]

Hi folks, thanks for filling in the whenisgood. Not surprisingly, we haven't managed to find a time that works for everyone. In fact, the best we could do is fit 4-5 of us on November 2 at 1700 UTC. Sorry about that. We'll keep meeting notes etc. as usual, and we'll need to decide on an async discussion platform too.

This time, we'll meet on our Jitsi link again:

https://meet.jit.si/moderated/27ddeaff25933944fea1937f182235d48de7c2dd59dc2f84f8eebb26a8fc07ab

Calendar invite here (you'll need to rename the file to remove the .txt at the end to import it to your calendar app).

software-wg-guidelines-taskforce-initial.ics.txt

I'll see you all there.

[sanjayankur31]

Hi folks,

A reminder of today's meeting. Here's the jitsi link:

https://meet.jit.si/moderated/27ddeaff25933944fea1937f182235d48de7c2dd59dc2f84f8eebb26a8fc07ab

Cheers!

[mstimberg]

Apologies, unfortunately I won't be able to make it to today's meeting (but still interested in contributing of course). Have a good meeting everyone!

[sanjayankur31]

I've started the Jitsi meeting now folks, please join at your convenience:

https://meet.jit.si/moderated/27ddeaff25933944fea1937f182235d48de7c2dd59dc2f84f8eebb26a8fc07ab

The shared meeting notes doc is here: https://hackmd.io/@sanjayankur31/B1TokmxBi

[sanjayankur31]

Thanks for the meeting folks. Please go through the meeting notes document for the complete logs:

https://hackmd.io/@sanjayankur31/B1TokmxBi

The primary action item from today's meeting is:

• ACTION: task force members go through resources to make example lists of what items they think would be useful. The idea is to go through the lists to see why they are insufficient (if they are insufficient), and to come up with individual lists of items that we will compare in the next meeting.

We will compare our lists in the next meeting in two weeks to get a better understanding of what we think the list should contain, and who our target audience will be. (@cmahapatra97 will set up a new doodle for us to find a meeting time in the week starting November 14.)

Please feel free to write your lists wherever, and we can collate them all in the shared document before the next meeting.

[mstimberg]

Hi everyone and apologies for being a bit late, but did you decide on a time/data for the second meeting?

[dissagaliyeva]

@mstimberg I'm totally fine with the same time as today :) however, I'm ok with changing it if people can't make it

[mstimberg]

@dissagaliyeva I think there might have been a misunderstanding, my question is about the "best practice guidelines" task force, not about the "simulator resource " task force that was meeting earlier today 😊

[sanjayankur31]

@cmahapatra97 : I think you are going to send out a doodle at some point for us to find the next meeting time?

[mstimberg]

:bell: Any news? Do you think there will be another meeting before people head off for end-of-year vacations?

[cmahapatra97]

Dear all, Please poll your preferred slot. https://doodle.com/meeting/participate/id/ep85QV2e Thank you. Chitaranjan

Chitaranjan Mahapatra

On Mon, Dec 5, 2022 at 3:43 PM Marcel Stimberg @.***> wrote:

🔔 Any news? Do you think there will be another meeting before people head off for end-of-year vacations?

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[mstimberg]

Thanks @cmahapatra97 for setting up the doodle. For me the proposed times are difficult to make, but if this works for most, then by all means go ahead without me.

[cmahapatra97]

Hey, we can reschedule it. Let me know your preferred time.

---

Chitaranjan Mahapatra

On Mon, Dec 5, 2022 at 4:27 PM Marcel Stimberg @.***> wrote:

Thanks @cmahapatra97 https://github.com/cmahapatra97 for setting up the doodle. For me the proposed times are difficult to make, but if this works for most, then by all means go ahead without me.

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[mstimberg]

Hey, we can reschedule it. Let me know your preferred time.

For me, it would be much easier to schedule something during the (European) day. But my schedule in the coming days is already quite packed, especially in the afternoons. I don't know the timezones for the other members, maybe there simply isn't a solution that works for everyone…

[brenthuisman]

If it's not too late to chip in: someone pointed me to Erik de Schutter's Why Are Computational Neuroscience and Systems Biology So Separate?, which compares software engineering culture of two different areas of biology (neuroscience and systems biology), and I recognize quite a few things that could be impacted by a set of dev guidelines (data sharing is much more developed in system biology e.g.). Chapter 4 of the thesis of a student of a colleague also attempts to come up with such guidelines based on literature review.

The guidelines we could extract are less so about the specifics of tooling, but are more general, more social: what constitutes the sharing of a model? How far do you go with providing instructions for reproduction? At some point, the HBP had very specific ideas about this, which unfortunately did not work out due to a community that couldn't see the point. Guidelines with all/some of this in mind could be the start of an improvement, not just on the level of code formatting and repo structuring, but further.

Because it would be lazy to tell you what to do without me exerting effort, I'm happy to join a next meet.

[sanjayankur31]

We've not seen enough traction on this front, and I think the general view has been that there are specific bodies that do actively work on guidelines for various subjects---from programming to things like data sharing. So, the idea has been to maybe collect pointers to these instead of us writing fresh ones that we may or may not be able to maintain in the long run.

So, I propose we close this ticket here about guidelines and simply add a section on guidelines to our resources page where we collect various links.

Instead of guidelines, an idea was to come up with a "cook book"---a community resource of short code snippets for things that we do again and again. NeuralEnsemble used to have one, for example.

Thoughts @OCNS/software-wg ?

[sanjayankur31]

For initial resources (taken from what we'd collected for the guidelines), see: https://github.com/OCNS/SoftwareWG/commit/acf41934e2d6d02360582e572d743720b54791fd

Please feel free to add more there.

[sanjayankur31]

We've started the cookbook repository here. Please do that a look and add your commonly used snippets there. We'll discuss the creation of a new taskforce to maintain the cook book in a bit:

https://github.com/OCNS/CompNeuroCookBook

I'm going to close this issue now.