January 30, 2023
Last January, COSIMA (the Consortium for Ocean Sea Ice Modelling in Australia) held a national hackathon day, coordinated by Navid Constantinou.
38 people joined, spread between Canberra, Sydney, and Hobart. At ANU, 18 people from RSES and ACCESS-NRI attended in person. We made a bunch of new examples and fixed those that were outdated. Notably, a tutorial that we developed during the hackathon was recognised by the developers of the cf-xarray python package and is now linked into that package’s documentation!
– What’s a hackathon? Do you come together and hack?
– Yes, we’ll gather and code together, we help each other out!
– So it’s not illegal…?
– No!
– So what do you code?
– We make examples of common ways that people analyse ocean model output. Then we put those examples in an open-source repository so they’re available for everyone!
– Everyone? Like who wants this code?
– Everyone from students who are just getting started with ocean models to researchers who want to do some advanced analysis. People can scroll through the examples, find what suits their needs, and then take it and modify it!
– Oh that actually sounds attractive! I’ll join!
– Don’t forget to dress up. The theme is ocean/Finding Nemo/The little mermaid! We’ll also have pizza, cake, and beer!
– Groovy!