Author Archives: Thomas Boudreaux

Its often easy to write monolithic code. As always this revelation is one that is perhaps trivial to many who are deep into the development side of things but may not be as clear to those who use code as a little more than a tool. Here I want to provide a demo of oneContinue reading “Modular Code”

I spend a lot of time letting models of stars evolve, hours and hours per week. Each model might take anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes to finish (depending on the initial mass of the star, the resolution, and a few other factors that would distract from the main point of this post). TheContinue reading “Quick Parallelization to get Quicker Code”

Sometimes you end up in a command line. Perhaps, like me, its voluntary or perhaps you were compelled into it. Either way you will find yourself there sometimes. One of the most common things I do, and I know my peers do from the command line is run some pipeline. In this post I wantContinue reading “Make the makefiles”

After a pleasant break and a cancelled conference I’m back at astroBugs. This week I’m going to try and convince you that, for certain kinds of projects and code bases, you should wrap the source into a python package. “But Thomas” I hear you say “I already know this, if I want to distribute myContinue reading “Packaged code is usable code is happy code”

I was chatting with a Linux using, terminal toting, office mate of mine earlier today about Jupyter and its use cases. She contented “Why would I use Jupyter when I can just quickly plot something in the terminal”. Now, I am not often one to push people away from using the command line. However, inContinue reading “Jupyter For Data Exploration”

Off the bat I want to make clear that I am the author of the Python package I’ll be presenting in this post. While I don’t make any money off use of this package and I do earnestly believe that it has a useful place; I am obviously biased in its favor, so just keepContinue reading “Easy Animations & a Shameless Plug”

Warning: This post may anger, perhaps for good reason, computer scientists and/or actual developers. Recently I was trying to evolve models of low-mass stars (near the fully convective transition mass or ~0.3Msolar) using the Dartmouth Stellar Evolution Program (DSEP). DSEP is an older piece of FORTRAN 77 code (with some of the 9x variants thrownContinue reading “Dynamically Debugging”

I think we have likely all been in a journal club, or discussion, or just reading a paper where we look at a figure and think “Oh wow that’s not the best looking figure they could have made here”. Often times this is because the authors are trying to represent many dimensions simultaneously — theContinue reading “Pretty Easy Pretty Plots”

Part One In the previous part we introduced some basic concepts surrounding the command line, shells, and utilities. Here we are going to dive more deeply into what I would call “The essential utilities”. There are two main properties which I think a tool needs to become essential: one, solve a problem, two, solve thatContinue reading “An awk.ward encounter pt. 2”

Looking at a console and seeing output along the lines of “HERE 1”, “HERE 2″, ….”HERE [n]”, “HERE 1” used to be an all to common occurrence for me when I was running code. Be it for debugging or tracking loop progress the simplest way of quickly checking in on the runtime state of aContinue reading “A little bit of progress”