Another post, another conference!
This time it was the Asia-Pacific “Advanced Scientific Programming in Python” Summer School. A full 6 days of intensive training in the programming language Python, designed to extend my amateur skills and give me more tools to analyse my data.
And boy, did it deliver – kicking off with some free swag!
The formal sessions started with a welcome from the school’s founder, Tiziano, who’s first iteration of the school was over a decade ago. His opening remarks really resonated with me:
In industry there are normally teams tackling a problem. and it is important to be kind to your teammates by writing nice code and documenting well. In science, we often work alone on our own data, and that teammate is your future self. This week is all about being kind to your future self.
Each of the main sessions targeted a specific element of scientific program in python (from GitHub to tidy data in pandas to plotting with MatPlotLib to parallelization to packaging to cython). The tutors would spend a few minutes making sure our basic knowledge was up to speed, before taking those concepts and extending them beyond what I had ever considered possible from my programming life!
A huge part of the success of the school was pair programming. The school provided one computer between two, all formatted identically and containing all the necessary applications for the week, with which we were to work in pairs to solve the lecturer’s exercises. This was a completely new experience for me – not only had I never worked with anyone else collaboratively in a coding environment, I was not accustomed to sharing my code with anyone! I have always been shy of sharing my programs, feeling like they were amateur and ‘half done’. Now, not only did my partner get to see the ‘final’ product, they would get to watch my thoughts take shape on the page! As terrifying as it sounds, I really did learn a lot from observing others and from their input as we worked together.
To consolidate our knowledge, on the final day we were split into teams where we would collaborate using our newly minted GitHub skills. The goal was to program two pacman bots which would be pitted against the other teams in a tournament – not only did I have a great team, and a great time learning to work with the bots, but we WON! This meant the delivery of swag #2: a signed copy of “Elegant Scipy”!
With tutors from Europe, New Zealand, South America and Australia, we were spoilt for expertise. Most surprisingly (and delightfully) of all was that the student profiles were just as diverse! Over the course of the conference, I worked with a particle physicist, a plant biologist, an engineer, a medical radiation physicist and a virologist. Not to mention the age, cultural and gender diversity – the group of students was a beautiful reflection of the diversity of the scientific community.
I can honestly say I felt so privileged to be selected (the conference was free to a limited number of students), and it was hands down the most practical and valuable conference for developing skills I have ever attended. If you ever have the chance to go, I cannot recommend it enough.
Happy programming!
