Posts by Julia Kent
2024 Earth System Data Science (ESDS) Annual Event
- 21 November 2023
ESDS is hosting an annual event on January 18th and 19th (Thursday-Friday). This event will be hybrid, in-person in NCAR’s Mesa Lab Main Seminar Room as well as virtual.
The event will be hosted at the Mesa Lab Main Seminar Room, located at 1850 Table Mesa Dr, Boulder, CO 80305. In order to attend the event virtually, registered participants will be receiving an email from Taysia Peterson roughly one week prior to the event with Zoom details.
ESDS Office Hours Support
- 10 May 2023
A core goal of the ESDS community is to enhance the efficiency of the NCAR/UCAR workforce by fostering deeper collaboration across labs. ESDS Office Hours help achieve this goal by serving a dual purpose: helping scientists to more quickly overcome software challenges, which allows them to refocus on their scientific pursuits, and fostering connections among workers across different labs. Office Hours assistants benefit from having a scientific colleague as a “client”, enabling them to refine scientific use cases for their software development and fostering a greater sense of camaraderie. ESDS is always open to additional Office Hours assistants with diverse skill sets to join our team. If you are interested in becoming a part of the ESDS Office Hours team or if you would like to explore a similar service for your own team, this blog post is for you.
If you’re curious about the ESDS Office Hours system, see our previous New Office Hours Appointment System blog post).
Preparation for a (Re)Introduction to Earth System Data Science (ESDS) Across NCAR/UCAR/UCP
- 02 November 2022
ESDS is hosting a (Re)Introduction to Earth System Data Science (ESDS) Across NCAR/UCAR/UCP on November 10th and 11th (Thursday-Friday). This event will be hybrid, in-person in NCAR’s Mesa Lab Main Seminar Room and virtual over Zoom or Google Meet. More information is in this previous post.
This tutorial is designed to be run from Binder. You can do that by navigating to the GeoCat Tutorial Repository and selecting “Launch Binder” in the README.md.
A (Re)Introduction to Earth System Data Science (ESDS) Across NCAR/UCAR/UCP
- 18 October 2022
ESDS is hosting a (Re)Introduction to Earth System Data Science (ESDS) Across NCAR/UCAR/UCP on November 10th and 11th (Thursday-Friday). This event will be hybrid, in-person in NCAR’s Mesa Lab Main Seminar Room and virtual over Zoom and/or Google Meet.
Please register to the event through the Registration Form by Friday, November 4, 2022!
New Office Hours Appointment System
- 10 August 2022
The ESDS office hours are moving to an appointment scheduling page.
The previous office hours system was two one-hour blocks at the same time every week via a Zoom call where software engineers sit in and await scientists to show up and receive help. This was not ideal because some weeks no one showed up (which eventually leads to attrition of software engineers), and other weeks many people showed up and could not all receive the individualized help they needed. Also we had many software engineers and scientists with scheduling conflicts during these two static time blocks. You may have noticed these are no longer on the ESDS calendar.
What I’ve learned about debugging
- 12 May 2022
It can be easy to get discouraged when working on a coding problem. When you think you’ve solved a problem in your code, it turns out that you misunderstood or didn’t fully grasp the root of the problem. Then, you’re facing a new coding challenge where the computer continually returns a different result than expected. This can turn into a game of cat and mouse as you chase down the bugs that are in the way of your new shiny feature being implemented.
When this happens to me, I feel disheartened and imposter syndrome creeps up - and then I can shut down, wishing that coding was easier. For me, the silver lining here is that a lot of my work is geared towards educating geoscientists to be better coders. Despite always being STEM-oriented in my passions and work, coding can be hard. This is the experience for a lot of people, and certainly is the experience for a lot of the scientists I have worked with. Reflecting on my own struggles in my own software development practices, can help me teach coding from empathetic and helpful perspectives.
The Python Tutorial Series Returns this Summer!
- 11 May 2022
The Python Tutorial Series returns on every other Thurday at 1 PM Mountain starting May 26th with the 5-part “Your First” Python Tutorial series. The first lesson, “Opening a .txt File”, covers how to create your first Python script to open some simple data. Some tutorials will be 1-off lessons on specific topics, while others will span multiple sessions.
We will begin by following through the Xdev tutorial website, designed to introduce Python to scientists who already have a good deal of programming experience, albeit with a different language. Our main audience is NCAR scientists, but anyone who has some experience working in the terminal and understanding of basic coding structures who wants geoscience-applicable examples will find this tutorial series helpful and reqarding.
“Thinking with Xarray” Tutorial
- 04 March 2022
The NCAR/UCAR virtual Python Tutorial Seminar Series continues with an intermediate-level lesson on analysis with Xarray titled “Thinking with Xarray” on March 9th at 1 PM Mountain Standard Time led by Deepak Cherian.
Xarray is an open source project and Python package that makes working with multi-dimensional arrays simple and effient by introducing labels in the form of dimensions, coordinates and attributes on top of raw NumPy-like arrays. See the Xarray Documentation
MetPy Tutorial
- 07 February 2022
The NCAR/UCAR virtual Python Tutorial Seminar Series continues with a lesson on MetPy on February 9th at 1 PM Mountain Standard Time led by Drew Camron.
MetPy is a collection of tools in Python for reading, visualizing, and performing calculations with weather data. See the MetPy Documentation
Object Oriented Programming Tutorial
- 08 November 2021
The NCAR/UCAR virtual Python Tutorial Seminar Series continues with a lesson on Object Oriented Programming on November 10th at 1 PM Mountain Standard Time led by Dr. Kevin Paul.
The content for this seminar tutorial is hosted on Kevin’s Object Oriented Programming Tutorial Repository.
Advanced Plotting Tutorial
- 25 October 2021
The NCAR/UCAR virtual Python Tutorial Seminar Series continues with Advanced Plotting Techniques on Wednesday, October 27th at 1 PM Mountain. This session will be led by Anissa Zacharias.
The content for this tutorial is hosted on Anissa’s matplotlib-tutorial GitHub repository (the same repository as her previous plotting tutorials).
GeoCAT-Comp Tutorial
- 03 September 2021
The NCAR/UCAR virtual Python Tutorial Seminar Series continues highlighting the functionality developed by NCAR’s GeoCAT team with GeoCAT-comp on September 8th at 1 PM Mountain Daylight Time led by Alea Kootz.
The content for the GeoCAT-Viz tutorial is hosted on Alea’s GeoCAT-Comp Tutorial Repository.
Plotting with GeoCAT Tutorial
- 19 August 2021
The NCAR/UCAR virtual Python Tutorial Seminar Series continues with two sessions highlighting the functionality developed by NCAR’s GeoCAT team: 1) Plotting with GeoCAT on Wednesday, August 25th led by Anissa Zacharias and 2) GeoCAT-comp September 8th at 1 PM Mountain Daylight Time led by Alea Kootz. More information on the GeoCAT-comp tutorial TBA.
The content for the Plotting with GeoCAT tutorial is hosted on Anissa’s Plotting with GeoCAT Tutorial Repository.
Dask Tutorial UPDATED DATES
- 23 July 2021
The NCAR/UCAR virtual Python Tutorial Seminar Series continues with a 2-part introduction to the Python package dask on Wednesday, July 28th and August 11th at 1 PM Mountain Daylight Time. These sessions will be led by Anderson Banihirwe.
Note: These dates have changed from the previous Dask Tutorial announcement.
Dask Tutorial
- 08 July 2021
The NCAR/UCAR virtual Python Tutorial Seminar Series continues with a 2-part introduction to the Python package dask on Wednesday, July 14th and August 11th at 1 PM Mountain Daylight Time. These sessions will be led by Anderson Banihirwe.
The content for this tutorial is hosted on Anderson’s Xarray Tutorial Github Repository. This is the same repository as the previous Xarray tutorials.
Xarray Tutorial
- 04 June 2021
The NCAR/UCAR virtual Python Tutorial Seminar Series continues with a 2-part introduction to the Python package xarray on Wednesday, June 9th and June 23rd at 1 PM Mountain Daylight Time. These sessions will be led by Anderson Banihirwe.
The content for this tutorial is hosted on Anderson’s Xarray Tutorial Github Repository. However, since final edits are being made to these notebooks we ask that you please wait until after 1 PM MDT on June 8 to download the materials (the Tuesday before the first session). This will ensure that you have the latest version of the notebooks.
Pandas Tutorial
- 19 May 2021
The NCAR/UCAR virtual Python Tutorial Seminar Series continues with an introduction to the Python package pandas on Wednesday, May 26th at 1 PM Mountain. This session will be led by Drew Camron and Max Grover.
The content for this tutorial is hosted on Max’s NCAR Pandas Tutorial Github Repository
Git and GitHub Tutorial
- 07 May 2021
The NCAR/UCAR virtual Python Tutorial Seminar Series continues with an introduction to the Python package Git and GitHub on Wednesday, May 12th at 1 PM Mountain. This session will be led by Kevin Paul.
The purpose of this seminar is to cover just some of the common content needed to understand and use git and GitHub for collaboration on software. This is not meant to be an introduction to git or GitHub.
Cartopy Tutorial
- 26 April 2021
The NCAR/UCAR virtual Python Tutorial Seminar Series continues with an introduction to the Python package cartopy on Wednesday, April 28th at 1 PM Mountain. This session will be led by Michaela Sizemore.
The content for this tutorial is hosted on Michaelsa’s Cartopy Tutorial Github Repository
Object Oriented Programming Tutorial
- 09 April 2021
The NCAR/UCAR virtual Python Tutorial Seminar Series continues with an introduction to Object Oriented Programming on Wednesday, April 14th at 1 PM Mountain. This session will be led by Austin Kootz.
The content for this tutorial is hosted on Austin’s oop_hrrr_tutorial GitHub repository.
Matplotlib Tutorial FAQ
- 30 March 2021
Here is a compilation of questions and issues that arose during the Matplotlib session of the Python Tutorial Seminar Series.
Q. Are all the colormaps perceptually ordered?
NumPy Tutorial FAQ
- 19 March 2021
Here is a compilation of questions and issues that arose during the Numpy session of the Python Tutorial Seminar Series.
The live video recording of this content can be found here.
Matplotlib Tutorial
- 19 March 2021
The NCAR/UCAR virtual Python Tutorial Seminar Series continues with an introduction to the Python package matplotlib on Wednesday, March 24th at 1 PM Mountain. This session will be led by Anissa Zacharias.
The content for this tutorial is hosted on Anissa’s matplotlib-tutorial GitHub repository. Primarily direct your attention to the matplotlib-tutorial.ipynb.
Jupyter Notebooks Tutorial FAQ
- 03 March 2021
Here is a compilation of questions and issues that arose during the Jupyter Notebooks session of the Python Tutorial Seminar Series.
Q. I installed Miniconda but it doesn’t seem to be working. conda is not a recognized command. What should I do?
Numpy Tutorial
- 26 February 2021
The NCAR/UCAR virtual Python Tutorial Seminar Series continues with an introduction to the Python package numpy on Wednesday, March 10th at 1 PM Mountain. This session will be led by Austin Kootz.
Check your conda install if this is the first tutorial in the series you are joining us for with conda --version and if necessary install by following these instructions
Your First Package Python Tutorial FAQ
- 19 February 2021
Here is a compilation of questions from the fourth and fifth sessions (“Your First Package”) of the Python Tutorial Seminar Series which covered refactoring code into seperate modules and packages, using an external built-in module (math), and how to publish your package
Q. Should we add __init__.py to .gitignore?
Python Tutorial Seminar Series - Spring 2021
- 16 February 2021
The “Your First” Python Tutorial Series is over, but the tutorial seminar series continues.
All events are at 1 PM Mountain
Python Tutorial FAQ - Part 3
- 18 November 2020
Here is a compilation of questions from the third session of the Python Tutorial Seminar Series which covered writing functions as well as f-string formatting.
Q. Seeing how 2/2 returns 1.0 instead of 1, is the numeric type automatically determined from the inputs or do you have to force it?
Python Tutorial FAQ - Part 2
- 05 November 2020
Here is a compilation of questions and issues that arose during the second session of the Python Tutorial Seminar Series, on creating a data dictionary. After this first short series, these FAQ sections will be added to the Xdev tutorial website
Q. Why is list[0:10] the first 10 elements, not 11?
Python Tutorial FAQ
- 20 October 2020
Here is a compilation of questions and issues that arose during the first session of the Python Tutorial Seminar Series. Hopefully all attendees feel that their issues are addressed here.
Q. I am having issues running the command:
curl -kO https://sundowner.colorado.edu/weather/atoc8/wxobs20170821.txt.
What should I do?
Tutorial Seminar Series
- 18 September 2020
Because we are unable to host an in-person tutorial for this fall season, the Xdev team has decided to switch to a virtual seminar series. We will be hosting one hour tutorial sessions scheduled for the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of each month at 1 PM Mountain starting in October. The first tutorial session, covering how to create your first Python script, will be on October 14th. Some tutorials will be 1-off seminars on specific topics, while others will span multiple seminar sessions.
Remote tutorials offer their own challenges; no one from our team can walk around the room to notice if anyone needs technical help or one-on-one assistance during a challenging topic. We believe that one hour sessions make it easier for participants to reach out and get the help they need to catch up before the next session of a multi-part seminar, so that we can more effectively reach our education goals.
The Significance of Time
- 28 August 2019
Time is relative, as my coworker Anderson likes to remind me every time manipulating this coordinate proves to be relatively difficult.
This post is to be the first in a series of my struggles coming from an atmospheric science background and transitioning into software. My hope is that if I detail pain points and headaches I encounter along my journey, you won’t have to.