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.

After this workshop, you will be able to:

• Articulate why we should produce clean, human-readable code and code documentation.
• Write clear and efficient comments in a script.
• Construct a README following a template.

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 (or we’ll have an example for you to use).