Last week I gave a talk at Utrecht University in which I presented the PyNTA package to an audience of researchers. In the talk, I stressed the fact that PyNTA is free, open source, and is hosted on Github. However, one of the professors was not convinced with what I …

A child project of Uetke is Python For The Lab, a website where you can find articles about Python programming and a Forum to evacuate your doubts. We had also included a newsletter sign-up form, similar to the one you find here on the right or at the bottom of …

It is a rough time for privacy online. Every user who is browsing websites is generating loads of data that ends up in the hands of few and very powerful global players. For example, Facebook convinced webmasters to place a tiny pixel in their websites in order to monitor which …

The group of Michel Orrit at Leiden University was the first one to participate in the Python For The Lab workshop. In total, seven students gathered for three full days of coding and development. We discussed design principles, the basics of instrumentation and built a small experiment to measure the …

When dealing with large amounts of data, either experimental or simulated, saving it to several text files is not very efficient. Sometimes you need to access a very specific subset of data and you want to do it fast. In these situations, the HDF5 format solves both issues thanks to …

Managing research projects and teams can benefit from the methodologies and processes developed in other fields of management. In recent decades, software development became a major industry that needed to establish its own set of rules and procedures. People working in the software industry and young scientists such as Ph …

Python is rich in resources that can shorten the time it takes to develop new programs and simplify repetitive tasks. Decorators are one of such elements but more often than not they are not considered by less experienced developers. Adding decorators to the syntactic toolbox can be of great use …

External drives are a great complement to laptops with a limited amount of memory. The data you generate in the lab may not fit on the SSD drive of your ultrabook, or you want to keep access to older information. Not only scientific data takes a lot of space, also …

When you develop applications for the lab, probably you want to be able to re-use parts of the code and allow other scientists to build on your work. This problem has been discussed at length around other applications, such as building web services. And in a certain way, developing a …