In the beginnings were...data and data types. Which is where we begin our journey through C++. The language provides for a range of interesting, fundamental, complex and custom types - one of which is a set of pointer types.
My guest in this episode is Marc Hartung from Dive in Berlin, Germany.

Links:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointer_(computer_programming) summary of what pointers are
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_(programming_language) one of the early uses of pointers in the APL language
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management article on memory management
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/cpp/type-conversions-and-type-safety-modern-cpp an article on type conversion
• https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/_005f_005fint128.html GCC compiler and support for 128bit integers
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B_Standard_Library C++ Standard Library
• https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/242604.242613 Ań article on how the C++ Standard Library emerged
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Template_Library the Standard Template Library (not to be confused with the C++ Standard Lib)

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

This first episode is about introducing C++, where it started, how it evolved. You will hear from 2 practitioners: Klaus Iglberger (C++ coach/trainer) and Marc Hartung (tech lead at Dive in Berlin).

Here are a few links for you to follow up on:

• https://www.stroustrup.com The Home Page of Bjarne Stroustrup who created C++. There are plenty of links for you to follow
• https://isocpp.org/std/the-standard The C++ standard homepage
• https://www.mn.uio.no/tjenester/it/hjelp/programvare/simula/versions/simula-1967/commonbasedefinition1967.pdf the specs of Simula 67, still available online. Simula inspired B Stroustrup for C++
• https://www.divecae.com Dive the company Marc Hartungs works at who produce simulation software (hydrodynamics)
• https://github.com/igl42 Klaus Iglberger's GitHub

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

In this last episode of this course, I talk to Itamar Turner-Trauring who created the website PythonSpeed and spent a considerable time on finding ways to make Python code faster and more efficient. Python and its ecosystem also have great tools how you can measure performance.

Links:

• https://pythonspeed.com a set of articles and recommendations on how to improve your performance
• https://blog.sentry.io/python-performance-testing-a-comprehensive-guide/ a general blog post on performance testing
• https://uwpce-pythoncert.github.io/SystemDevelopment/profiling.html
  • https://uwpce-pythoncert.github.io/SystemDevelopment/index.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance
• https://python-102.readthedocs.io/en/latest/performance.html
• https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html
• https://www.green-algorithms.org
• https://doi.org/10.1145/356635.356640 Donald Knuth's paper on over optimisation
• https://wiki.python.org/moin/TimeComplexity
• https://blog.jetbrains.com/dataspell/2023/08/polars-vs-pandas-what-s-the-difference/ comparing Polars with Panda

Profiling tools

• https://pyinstrument.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
• https://docs.python.org/3/library/profile.html
• https://docs.python.org/3/library/time.html the time function in Python
• https://docs.python.org/3/library/timeit.html another function to measure time in Python
• https://jiffyclub.github.io/snakeviz/ a graphic profile viewer
• https://bloomberg.github.io/memray/ flexible memory profiler
• https://github.com/benfred/py-spy
  • https://www.wrighters.io/profiling-python-code-with-py-spy/
• https://github.com/P403n1x87/austin-python The Python wrapper for the Austin profiler

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

In this episode I talk to Jeremiah Miller - a software engineer - and Max Albert - a research software engineer in the research software group at the University of Southampton about refactoring and design patterns.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_code
• https://www.distributed-systems.net/index.php/books/ds4/ book by A Tanenbaum
• https://refactoring.com The Refactoring book by Martin Fowler
  • https://martinfowler.com/architecture/
  • https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/
  • https://martinfowler.com
• https://www.patternlanguage.com the original book by Christopher Alexander on design patterns in architecture - for towns, cities etc. This book inspired software engineers to define a set of design patterns on how to structure code
• https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns Max recommended Sandi and her tips and recommendations on coding
• https://sandimetz.com/99bottles the idea of making things as identical as possible to sniff out design breaks or changes
• https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns another website on design patterns and refactoring

Some books:

• Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides, Addison-Wesley, 1995, ISBN 0-201-63361-2
• Enterprise Integration Patterns Gregor Hohpe, Bobby Woole, Addison-Wesley, 2004, ISBN 0-321-20068-3

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

In this episode I talk to Monika Byrne Svata, Agile Delivery Manager at UCL about project management and in particular Scrum and Kanban. GitHub has features, like Issues and Projects that can help you stay on top of your software projects.

Links

• http://www.linkedin.com/in/monikabyrnesvata Monika's LinkedIn profile
• https://docs.github.com/en/issues/planning-and-tracking-with-projects/learning-about-projects/about-projects GitHub projects documentation
• https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira JIRA
• https://trello.com/home Trello
• https://agilemanifesto.org Agile Manifesto
• https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-scrum-module Scrum, a popular agile methodology
  • https://www.agile42.com/en/blog/scrum-history Scrum history
• https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban Kanban methodology
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban a bit of background to Kanban
• https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/waterfall.html Waterfall methods
• https://digital.ai/resource-center/analyst-reports/state-of-agile-report/ annual report on all things agile

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

Documentating software is part of the life of software engineers. But what kind of documentation do we need? In this episode I take you through three levels of documentation: the basic README and LICENSE files everyone should have, how to be good at writing git commit messages and using tools to turn your source code comments into browsable documentation.

Links

• https://www.sphinx-doc.org/
• https://pdoc.dev/docs/pdoc.html
  • https://docs.python.org/3/library/pydoc.html
• https://wiki.python.org/moin/DocumentationTools
• https://peps.python.org/pep-0287/ reStructuredText Docstring Format
• https://github.com/matiassingers/awesome-readme some README examples
  • https://dev.to/documatic/awesome-readme-examples-for-writing-better-readmes-3eh3
• https://www.gitkraken.com/learn/git/best-practices/git-commit-message GIT commit messaging
• https://www.warp.dev/terminus/git-commit-history Git Commit history

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

Testing your software is part of development. In this episode I talk about different types of testing, automated tests, legacy code etc. My guest is Stef Piatek from UCL who tells us how he approaches testing in his daily work.

Links

• https://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.html
• https://docs.pytest.org/
  • https://docs.pytest.org/en/7.1.x/how-to/monkeypatch.html PyTest Monkeypatch
• https://agiledata.org/essays/tdd.html test driven development TDD
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming
• https://joss.readthedocs.io/en/latest/review_criteria.html criteria for open source software reviews, which includes a section on testing
• https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/a-practical-guide-to-start-opensource-contributions/
• https://docs.github.com/en/actions GitHub Actions
• https://martinfowler.com Martin Fowler's great web site. Also look out for his book:
  • Working Effectively With Legacy Code - Michael Feathers, 2004, ISBN: 8601400968741

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

In this episode I'll be discussing data formats such as CSV, JSON and YAML. My guest is Nick Radcliffe from Stochastic Solutions and the Uni. Edinburgh. Nick's expertise is in data science and he has a lot to share about data, data formats and how to use them.

Links

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/njradcliffe/ Nick's LinkedIn profile
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values CSV formats
• https://www.json.org/json-en.html JSON
  • https://json-ld.org JSON for linked data
  • https://json-schema.org JSON schema
• https://yaml.org YAML
• https://parquet.apache.org Parquet by Apache
• https://hdfgroup.github.io/hdf5/ HDF5

Libraries

• https://numpy.org
• https://scipy.org
• https://scikit-learn.org/stable/
• http://www.tdda.info test driven data analysis

Don't be shy - say Hi

This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt