By: Juliana Kilty, SSEC Student Assistant
The Scientific Software Engineering Center (SSEC) held their first Learnathon from September 5th-7th this fall. Participants had the opportunity to explore topics in three general categories: tools, infrastructures, and processes. The Learnathon was conducted in tutorial style, led by SSEC team members with specific expertise. These informative presentations enabled the team to share knowledge across many topics ranging from Python specific libraries to Github Codespaces. It’s not every day you can learn from colleagues on such relevant subject matter!
This Learnathon was one way for the SSEC team to demonstrate their educational priorities in conjunction with their engineering projects. The Center’s location on UW’s Seattle campus facilitates an educational atmosphere that enhances the team’s software engineering responsibilities. By creating this knowledge sharing opportunity, team members were able to educate each other on what they are doing as well as learning technologies that will help them expand their respective toolboxes. Here are the topics that the team covered in just three days:
Tools
- XArray/Dask 101
- Computer Vision 1.0 + OpenCV
- Streamlit App Development
- NLP/PyTorch for NLP
- VS Code Debugging
- Signal Processing with Python
- Jupyterbook Documentation
Infrastructures
- Classroom Deployments and Best Practices
- Python Scientific Software Development (CI/CD, Packaging)
- AI for Scientific Computing
- GitHub Codespaces + Docker 1.0
- GitHub Codespaces + Docker 2.0
- Cloud Deployments
Processes
- ZenHub for Project Management
- Software Reproducibility
This is quite an impressive catalog for three short days! While this Learnathon was solely for the SSEC team, there will be a similar event hosted by SSEC on UW’s Seattle campus for the greater data science community. I, for one, am excited to learn more about AI for Scientific Computing.
If you are interested in learning more about any of the topics taught during this Learnathon, please email Technical Program Manager Anshul Tambay for more information. Some of the tutorials that were held during this event will also be available at SSEC’s monthly Research Software Engineering meetups!