search

UCL-ARC / coding-standards

ARC's recommended coding standards
http://github-pages.arc.ucl.ac.uk/coding-standards/
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
8 stars 0 forks source link

Proposal to adopt and refresh this repository for "RSE Good Practices" #19

Closed HChughtai closed 3 days ago

HChughtai commented 4 months ago

Summary

As part of ongoing initiatives to strengthen the RSE team and our practices, we've (re)identified that it's important to have a default place to write down our thoughts, experience and ideas about what good practice looks like for RSEs in the many parts of Collaborations projects lifecycle (i.e. planning, initiation, construction, testing, etc). By writing these down, we have a place to refer ourselves and collaborators to, as well as a place to invite feedback and change to processes.

"Coding standards" form part of these good practices, so rather than creating yet another location, we propose that we adopt and expand this repository to cover other aspects of RSE good practices forming a community driven "RSE Good Practices Handbook".

Questions

Some questions that may come up, and our initial thoughts (to be updated as we go along)

Is this a good idea? What are the downsides?

Why not include this in existing internal docs? What is the argument for it to be public?

My subgroup/programming-language of choice/xyz already has a good place for this? Should I move it

Why only RSEs? Is this only for Collaborations? What about profession xyz that has similar needs?

Next Steps

milanmlft commented 4 months ago

I like this idea! I think we were already drifting beyond just coding standards with the suggestion to add git/github recommendations (#7). It makes sense to me to bundle these recommendations in one place.

Why only RSEs? Is this only for Collaborations? What about profession xyz that has similar needs? I think it makes sense to focus on RSEs, as I imagine it will be mostly us that will be generating these recommendations, and also to not make it too generic, but that doesn't mean that others can't benefit from it of course (since we make it public)!

gsvarovsky commented 3 months ago

Need to establish relationship with https://github.com/UCL-ARC/research-software-documentation/blob/main/processes/programming_projects/group_practices.md

samcunliffe commented 1 month ago

Need to establish relationship with https://github.com/UCL-ARC/research-software-documentation/blob/main/processes/programming_projects/group_practices.md

The idea was originally to migrate the coding standards (and good practices, if you like) out from our private docs into a public place. Hopefully there are no(?) coding standards in research-software-documentation 🥺 → #4

The stretch-goal here is to merge this back into https://github.com/UCL-ARC/arc-internal-documentation (eventually) and make portions of that public. So there will be one source of truth.

samcunliffe commented 1 month ago

I think the proposal is a good one, but I would be cautious about the title.

HChughtai commented 3 days ago

Discussion between @milanmlft, @samcunliffe, @pineapple-cat, @K-Meech and @HChughtai at a docathon. Decision made to proceed and discussion about naming and scope started