Scientists spend more and more time writing, maintaining, and debugging software. While techniques for doing this efficiently have evolved, only few scientists have been trained to use them. As a result, instead of doing their research, they spend far too much time writing deficient code and reinventing the wheel. In this course we will present a selection of advanced programming techniques and best practices which are standard in the industry, but especially tailored to the needs of a programming scientist. Lectures are devised to be interactive and to give the students enough time to acquire direct hands-on experience with the materials. Students will work in pairs throughout the school and will team up to practice the newly learned skills in a real programming project — an entertaining computer game.
We use the Python programming language for the entire course. Python works as a simple programming language for beginners, but more importantly, it also works great in scientific simulations and data analysis. We show how clean language design, ease of extensibility, and the great wealth of open source libraries for scientific computing and data visualization are driving Python to become a standard tool for the programming scientist.
This school is targeted at Master or PhD students and Post-docs from all areas of science. Competence in Python or in another language such as Java, C/C++, MATLAB, or R is absolutely required. Basic knowledge of Python and of a version control system such as git, subversion, mercurial, or bazaar is assumed. Participants without any prior experience with Python and/or git should work through the proposed introductory material before the course.
We are striving hard to get a pool of students which is international and gender-balanced: see how far we got in previous years!
Date & Location
23–28 August, 2021. Bordeaux, 
France
Application process
The application process is closed.
There has been no renewed application process this year. In 2020 we had to cancel the ASPP2020 school. Places for this year's ASPP2021 school are reserved for the candidates invited in 2020.
If you are interested in participating in a future event, write to info@aspp.school to be put on the announcement list for ASPP2022, which is already being planned.
Program
- Version control with git and how to contribute to open source projects with GitHub
- Best practices in data visualization
- Testing and debugging scientific code
- Advanced NumPy
- Organizing, documenting, and distributing scientific code
- Advanced scientific Python: context managers and generators
- Writing parallel applications in Python
- Profiling and speeding up scientific code with Cython and numba
- Programming in teams
Sponsors
We are able to hold this year's ASPP school thanks to the generous support of the Ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur, de la Recherche et de l'Innovation.
