Learn why it’s important to annotate code, practice commenting in code, and write a README document.

When we write code, it’s important to also write what the code does. By writing good comments that explain our code and completing other documentation such as README files, we can ensure that code is shareable and reusable. Whether you’re revisiting a project you started a while ago, sending your code to your PI, or sharing a project publicly (for example, on a Github repository), code annotation makes things a lot easier.

In this workshop, we will practice annotating code—bring your own, or we will have a language-agnostic example that you can use. Additionally, we will discuss README files: what they are, why they’re important, and how to write them. Participants will come away with best practices for code annotation and a template for README-style documentation. This workshop is open to all, but is targeted to faculty, staff, students, and researchers who are already writing code (in any programming language) and would like to learn more about effectively sharing their work. Please bring a laptop and any code you would like to annotate.