Getting Started
Getting Started
We use several online tools to collaborate and communicate. New members can enlist the help of existing group members to get set up on these tools.
Communication and Organization
We use many tools for sharing our work with the team.
Chatrooms
Most of our lab communication is in a single chatroom rather than email. This way any written communication is available to all members of the group. This allows the team to stay current with the issues others are having.
You will receive an invitation to join our chatroom via email.
Google Drive
For simple documents, we use google drive. SSU students have an Google Drive account. Please provide me with your user name and I can share our folders with you.
Virtual Lab Book
You will keep a virtual lab book and post it to GitHub. You can place a link to it in the Wiki with Daniel Soto's lab book repository. As you do work, you will post files with your thoughts, code, or results so that the other members can keep up with your progress.
Markdown files work well if you aren't generating graphs or explaining code. Jupyter Notebooks work well when you want to show lots of code, tables, or graphs. Both of these are rendered nicely on GitHub so others can view your work.
Story Boards
For each of our projects, we maintain a "Story Board" in our Google Drive. This contains the overall plan of all the tasks associated with the project from question definition to analysis to publication. Read through these to determine where you can best contribute.
GitHub
If you don't have an account, please set one up on GitHub. This site allows us to collaborate on computer code where we want to use a sophisticated version control system to keep track of changes to our work. Once you have this account username, send it to me and I can add you to whatever repositories you should have access to.
Work Plans
Each week we write down the things we hope to accomplish and our estimates of the time it will take. At the end of the week we review these and see if what we did matched our plans. This helps us to focus our efforts and to get a better estimate of how long different tasks take to accomplish.
Tools
We do most of our analysis and communication using the Python scientific libraries and the Jupyter platform.
Anaconda
We use the conda package manager to install our Python environments. You can download a copy here.
Libraries
Pandas provides a spreadsheet-like object for analysis
Matplotlib is a basic plotting library
Seaborn allows for powerful statistical plots
You can install these libraries using conda once you have it installed.
Last updated