Regular expressions are a powerful way to express patterns in text, and are incredibly useful for hunting through large blocks of text for the proverbial needle, or replacing multiple instances of one pattern with another. This week, Jacob Wilkins led a hands-on session introducing regular expressions (or regex) and how...
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Test driven development
Unit tests and test driven development (TDD) are powerful software
development techniques that will improve your code’s reliability,
design and your own personal stress level. This week Steve Biggs led a
hands-on session where he took us through writing and running unit
tests in Python using TDD.
Debugging
Bugs in code are a fact of life, and being able to quickly debug a
failing program is a vital skill for any software developer. This
week, Matt Probert led another hands-on session on debugging using the
standard Linux debugger, gdb.
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How to do everything in Emacs
Something a bit different this week. Working with various different codes in various different languages, along with writing presentations, talks and papers, I spend most of my day writing text, just with different syntaxes. As such, I like to be able to do it all in the same program –...
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Python for scientific calculations
This week Ben Dudson gave us a crash course in how to use Python
efficiently for scientific calculations, showing us various ways to
get decent speeds out of pure Python code.
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