Skip to content

Introduction

These materials aim to support early- and mid-career researchers (EMCRs) in the SPECTRUM and SPARK networks to develop their computing skills, and to make effective use of available tools1 and infrastructure2.

Structure

Start with the basics: Our orientation tutorials provide overviews of essential skills, tools, templates, and suggested workflows.

Learn more about best practices: Our topical guides explain a range of topics and provide exercises to test your understanding.

Come together as a community: Our Community of Practice is how we come together to share skills, knowledge, and experience.

Motivation

Question

Why dedicate time and effort to learning these skills? There are many reasons!

The overall aim of these materials is help you conduct code-driven research more efficiently and with greater confidence.

Hopefully some of the following reasons resonate with you.

  • Fearlessly modify your code, knowing that your past work is never lost, by using version control with git.

  • Verify that your code behaves as expected, and get notified when it doesn't, by writing tests.

  • Ensure that your results won't change when running on a different computer by "baking in" reproducibility.

  • Improve your coding skills, and those of your colleagues, by working collaboratively and making use of peer code review.

  • Run your code quickly, and without relying on your own laptop or computer, by using high-performance computing.

Foundations of effective research

A piece of code is often useful beyond a single project or study.

By applying the above skills in your research, you will be able to easily reproduce past results, extend your code to address new questions and problems, and allow others to build on your code in their own research.

The benefits of good practices can continue to pay off long after the project is finished.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

  1. Such as version control and testing frameworks. ↩

  2. Such as the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud and Spartan. ↩