incorporate linting

[blue442]

We want to utilize the flake8 linter to ensure that our code is up to basic standards for style and formatting. To ensure that all developers are following the same practice, we can set up flake 8 to integrate format checking at two points:

• Set up a precommit hook to run flake8 when commits are made
• Set up a github action to run flake8 on pushes and pull requests

We can configure the flake8 instance as needed, but we'll start by just expanding the maximum line length. The .yaml configuration will look like:

[flake8]
max-line-length = 160