Topics

[natj]

Possible topics to discuss:

• intro to version control (git)
• university & csc facilities, tools and software
• online git-based editing/publishing tools (Overleaf)
• intro to Python
• good programming practices
• data vizualization
  • animations & videos
  • OpenGL & 3D
• fitting a line (properly with Bayesian inference)
• introducing R
• introduction to LaTeX
• intro to parallelization
• regular expressions (RegEx)
• unit testing
• C/C++
• I/O in general
• optimizing Python & R

[sndik16]

Suggesting more possible discussions (note that I am a mac user, so I did not use the console that much):

• latex - e.g. for 1) ESO proposals and for 2) submitting papers, maybe also for 3) collaborating on a paper via Overleaf or some other platform
• personal website, e.g. http://www-astro.physics.ox.ac.uk/~simmons/research.shtml or http://natj.github.io/
• github (seconding that this is interesting topic as mentioned in the natj post above)
• any data science topics (as a transferable skill for employment outside of academia etc.), such as Voronoi cells
• using the Terminal for Astronomy -related topics specifically, e.g. changing something in .fits file etc.
• explanation on different endings and how to open them (anything other than usual .doc, .html, etc)
• virtual machine / virtual box - basically how can you run Fedora linux for example which is needed for SciSoft package on your mac laptop and how to make it not as slow (was suggested by another student to use remote connection to a school linux computer)
• please always define programming terms - my biggest problem is the technical "lingo", e.g. meaning of brackets etc :) - especially the language in "error messages" in python
• external speakers from industry (transferable skills)

what I can contribute

• online support, societies - > I attended PyCon sponsored by PyLadies, so I can share how to get support for coding, especially if you are a woman - meetups etc.

suggested speaker

• James Stone :) - jamesstone.com -self-taught programmer who also builds websites and teaches programming at Penn State to engineers and artists (both programmers and people who did not program before), so maybe he has experience talking to the non-initiated

thank you for such a cool initiative

[natj]

New suggestion: basics of quantum computing (see IBM quantum experience )

[aunis]

Great initiative! I wish I could attend, but at least I can follow the materials here.