The twelfth SasView Contributor Camp was held in the convivial surroundings of the University of Delaware STAR Campus between 16-22 January inclusive.
The motivation behind rebranding the Code Camps to Contributor Camps was to emphasise that participation in the SasView collaboration is not solely dependent on ones ability to code: there are a multitude of ways to contribute. At some level the message clearly got through, because this was the best attended Camp ever! Over 30 people took part, two-thirds of them first-timers and one-third from outside the USA, from some 15 different facilities or universities!
Those that did code made over 200 commits, and across the four main project repositories (sasview, sasmodels, sasdata & tutorials) merged 22 of 43 pull requests and closed over 30 issues. But such was the level of scrutiny and testing also taking place that 65 new issues were created! In addition there was work on updating help documentation for new/improved functionality and the revising of some tutorials. The plan is that much of this endeavour will appear in a SasView 6.0.0 in a few months time.
For the benefit of the newcomers, introductory sessions were run on how to use Git/Slack, how pull requests work, understanding the structure of the code base, how to edit documentation, and how to script fitting in a Jupyter notebook. There was also a session on things you might not have realised you could do in SasView where even ‘old hands’ learnt a thing or two!
Alongside all this were a number of technical discussions on how to improve existing functionality in the program as well as to expanding its analysis capabilities.
All in all this was a hugely productive and inspiring workshop and sincere thanks are due to the University of Delaware and Norman Wagner for helping to facilitate it, and to the Local Organising Team, led by Paul Butler, that made it happen and kept everyone in coffee, cookies and pizza!
More details here.