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Student-led discussion prompts:

  • Explain something you've recently learned about scientific programming (in the broad sense; maybe a Python trick, maybe a command-line tool, maybe an organizational app, etc.), and why you've found it useful.

    • Jupyter notebook is very useful!

  • Give a summary of a recent astrobites post or astro-ph paper (or other cool science) you found interesting.

  • Describe a recent situation where you were confused about something, and then figured it out. (odds are you won't be the only one to be confused about this same thing!)

    • cygstart in cygwin opens files, analogous to open on a mac; you can also alias this to open if you want.

  • Describe a small feature of your everyday research routine that you just couldn't do without and that you think others might find helpful/useful.

    • Previous examples from 2015:
      • ctl + a, ctl + e, ctl + k, ctl + y in terminal/emacs/other things
      • In Sublime Text, you can overwrite all instances of a variable using ctl + f -> alt + enter
      • in terminal ctl + r look through history of commands
      • how to make aliases: e.g. alias computer="ssh -X user@computer.astro.princeton.edu" --> put this in your ~/.bash_profile file.
      • ls -ltrh
      • Don't underestimate the productivity increase from more screen space.
        • on linux department machines-- you can switch desktops with ctl + alt + <arrow keys>
      • screen program! look it up.
      • tramp in emacs-- allows you to edit files remotely even without (explicitly) logging on to remote machine.
      • history-search-backward: lets you search through previously typed commands at the prompt level
      • You can change the PS1 environment variable to make your shell prompt look different
      • history lists previous commands; you can then execute !123 (for example) to re-execute line 123 from your history.
      • touch <filename> creates a blank file that didn't exist before.
      • zip to iterate over multiple things at once in python
      • enumerate is useful in python!
      • code editors
        • TextWrangler
        • SublimeText (recommended!)
      • There are GUIs for git: e.g., Github Desktop, SourceTree
      • Overleaf for latex documents for online/collaborative editing