Software Engineering 101: I have some code! Now what?

As part of LLNL’s Computing 101 speaker series, Ian Lee gave a talk to employees on November 12 titled “Software Engineering 101: I have some code! Now what?” The presentation reviewed the Lab’s resources for supporting software engineering and open source development.

Lee, who manages this website and leads many initiatives in the Lab’s open source community, aimed his remarks at relative newcomers to the software development landscape. He also updated the audience on the state of open source development at the Lab.

The Lab provides a wide range of support and solutions for just about any task a developer does: programming languages, package managers, computing platforms, code editors, version control systems, project communication, project tracking, documentation, and much more. Lee provided an overview of these options, offered advice about how to navigate the Lab’s software resources, and encouraged developers to take advantage of colleagues’ knowledge and experience.

Lee summarized the Lab’s recent open source activity, which echoes a trend toward developing “out in the open,”—i.e., not waiting for code to mature before releasing it for community feedback and contributions. (As this website shows, the Lab and affiliated GitHub organizations have almost 600 repos.) Accordingly, the Lab has updated its open source release policies to support modern code development practices.

Among open source projects Lee highlighted in his talk were 2019 R&D 100 Award winners Spack and SCR (Scalable Checkpoint/Restart) and the software stack underpinning the Exascale Computing Project.

Lee also demoed this website’s category-driven design changes, LLNL’s open source logo (and stickers), the @LLNL_OpenSource Twitter account, and Slack channels. He noted that LLNL may have a booth at PyCon 2020, which will be held April 15-23 in Pittsburgh. (Conferences such as PyCon provide LLNL’s open source software community with opportunities for networking, collaboration, and technical skills development. Lab employees interested in attending similar events may contact Ian Lee for funding.)