Practical approaches to writing sustainable research software

NTD Modelling Consortium technical meeting 2021

View the slides

• Introduction
• Example 1: grouping parameters into objects
• Breakout room example: An SIR simulation
• Example 3: nested if/else and complex conditions
• Example 4: A long function
• Documentation strings and style guides
• How to improve your smell? Empathy, collaboration and exposure
• More on the Oxford RSE group

If you have a question, want to know more and simply want to chat about the material, feel free to open an issue on this repository.

References

Books

• Refactoring, by Martin Fowler The book that introduced the concept of "code smell". See particularly chapter 3 that discusses smells.

Talks

• useR 2018 - Code smells and fells, by Jenny Bryan
• Rails Conf 2016 - Get a Whiff of This by Sandi Metz

Articles and blogs

• Code Smells by Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror) J. Atwood is behind stack overflow.
• How To Write Unmaintainable Code by Roedy Green A classic.

Other

• Smells to Refactorings Quick Reference Guide (pdf)
• Code Smells on Refactoring Guru

To build the slides:

Clone the repository with submodules:

git clone git@github.com:OxfordRSE/https://github.com/OxfordRSE/NTDMC_tech_meeting_2021.git --recurse-submodules

Make sure you have pandoc and CMake installed

sudo apt install pandoc

Build the slides:

cd slides
mkdir build
bash update_reveal_dist.sh
cd build && cmake ..
make