discussion.md

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.

• 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!)

• 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 [email protected]" --> 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!)