Group Presentation

Rich Lewis

20/03/14

Group Website

Should we allocate people to write up a quick description of the research areas?

Demonstation

As a group, we are very multi-disciplined.
As such, collaboration within the group should be at the core of what we do.
Also, as a computational research group, we are very code focused.
Naturally, we should have a central place where we keep group related code and files, and leave them open for people to correct and improve.
At the moment, there are the shared drives, which work well for large datasets, however keeping track of code is more difficult.
For this, I propose we use GitHub

GitHub is built around Git, a version control tool designed by the same team that created Linux.

A version control tool, that keeps track of changes made to source code, allowing tracking of a projects progress.
This allows for quickly tracking where bugs are introduced in the code.
It also permits multiple people to work on a project without too much hassle.

The code is stored on a central server as a master copy in what git calls a repository.
A copy of this can be downloaded (pulled) by somebody to a remote repository on their local machine, edited by them in a helpful way, have these changes added to their local machine's repository (commited) and finally uploaded (pushed) into the master copy.

Helps you work: Keep better track of the development of your code
Collaboration: Let people easily locate, download and look at your code, and suggest improvements
Open Source Techniques: Provides an inside look into the development of many of the open-source project we use everyday, and open the doors for helping
Professional Development: Provides access to another professional 'social' network - a potential employer can look at your GitHub history and be assured that you can code well.