UCL for Code in Research

6/9 Research Software Engineering with Python (COMP233) - Documentation

Documentating software is part of the life of software engineers. But what kind of documentation do we need? In this episode I take you through three levels of documentation: the basic README and LICENSE files everyone should have, how to be good at writing git commit messages and using tools to turn your source code comments into browsable documentation.

Links

  • https://www.sphinx-doc.org/
  • https://pdoc.dev/docs/pdoc.html
    • https://docs.python.org/3/library/pydoc.html
  • https://wiki.python.org/moin/DocumentationTools
  • https://peps.python.org/pep-0287/ reStructuredText Docstring Format
  • https://github.com/matiassingers/awesome-readme some README examples
    • https://dev.to/documatic/awesome-readme-examples-for-writing-better-readmes-3eh3
  • https://www.gitkraken.com/learn/git/best-practices/git-commit-message GIT commit messaging
  • https://www.warp.dev/terminus/git-commit-history Git Commit history

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt