What is CodeLab? • Who is it for? • How to participate • Tech Stack • Projects • Contributors
eScience CodeLab (ECL) is a collaborative workgroup inspired by the ongoing hackweek events hosted by the eScience Institute at the University of Washington and the earthaccess community model.
- Create a synthesis of the longer format hackweek model and weekly office hours through ongoing, bi-weekly sessions that foster data science education, community building, and project work with an emphasis on open and reproducible science.
- Provide peer-to-peer code review, mentorship, and project management experience to those working with open source data science tools.
ECL is held on a variable, bi-weekly schedule, depending on the time of year, at the University of Washington's WRF Data Science Studio.
The ECL format includes a 15-minute introduction from eScience Institute staff for newcomers, followed by a collaborative working session for attendees. In-person collaboration is preferred, although remote participation is possible for certain projects through Zoom.
To provide an asynchronous collaboration space that exists beyond the workshop, ECL utilizes the discussion feature available in GitHub. This has two major benefits over Slack and email, specifically, a tighter intergration with the GitHub development architecture, and as a means to preserve historical conversations in a more persistent workspace.
CodeLab is an opportunity for scientists across all domains to create data management tools and workflows in a supportive community informed by best practices in open science and open software development.
If you are aiming to achieve any of the following goals in your research, CodeLab may be a good fit:
- Use GitHub to create, iterate, and collaborate on open-source data management and visualization tools for specific research domains.
- Learn development best practices for collaborative projects and code alongside researchers from multiple domains.
- Participate in an asynchronous development model where progress and collaboration are tracked via GitHub PR and discussion threads, providing an audit trail of work for casual and deep dive levels of engagement.
- A physical space to meet at the UW campus, should you need the added incentive of accountability to engage in the work at a specific time and place.
- View our discussion thread to start or join an ongoing project or conversation.
We are presently focused on developing Python software in support of several NASA missions. These are resources that newcomers may find useful to prepare for one of our sessions:
Having trouble with the setup process? We're happy to help you troubleshoot at the WRF Data Studio during office hours or at a CodeLab session.
After decades of anticipation, NASA recently launched the NISAR Mission in July 2025. We are using CodeLab sessions to create a local community of NISAR data users at the University of Washington who are interested to learn from one another sharing knowledge, code, and research ideas! Biweekly meetings are in-person at the WRF Data Science Studio. We are also using GitHub Discussions to share resources and ideas asynchronously between meetings.
- familiarize yourself with the NISAR mission and data products
- work independently on a topic (figure, code, text, idea, etc) of your choice with the ability to get feedback and support from the group
- understand the landscape of UW research that is using NISAR data
- crowd-source future funding opportunities and collaborations
- contribute to public resources for NISAR data users, such as a NISAR Cookbook
We are using CodeLab sessions to review tutorials from past ICESat-2 hackweeks. We are updating content and putting everything together into a comprehensive Jupyter Notebook. We are also making prepartions for our August Hackweek, getting clear on tasks and projects for us to work on when we meet in person.
- collaborate with ICESat-2 experts develop technical training following the Project Pythia Cookbook approach
- help review and test tutorial content
- contribute software development ideas for accessing ICESat-2 data products
Similar to the ICESat-2 work above, we are curating tutorials from past SnowEx hackweeks and helping to improve data access protocols for NASA snow data products.
- collaborate with ICESat-2 experts develop technical training following the Project Pythia Cookbook approach
- help review and test tutorial content
- contribute to database design for the SnowExSQL database.