The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) Software Engineering Assembly (SEA) recently organized a technical conference to assist in collaboration between National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)/UCAR and their peer institutions. This was also a time to share up-to-date practices and was meant to appeal to software engineers and computational scientists focused on scientific disciplines.

Three graduate students from Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) Justin Deloatch, Michael Jefferson, and Andrew Brumfield, took part in this conference. These students are part of the Center of Excellence in Remote Sensing Education and Research (CERSER) program under the direction of Dr. Linda Hayden.

The Software Engineering Conference (SEA) Hosted by University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) was intended as a forum for discussions of multiple aspects of software engineering. Located at NCAR’s Center Green Campus in Boulder, Colorado is intended to appeal to software engineers and Statistical scientist working at UCAR/NCAR. Other Institutions developing software focused on Global Information Systems (GIS) also present at the conference.

 The SEA conference during the week was half discussions and forums. To summarize some of the overall subjects of the sessions, the first two days were “Best Practices” chaired by Julianne and Ian, “Python” chaired by Srinath, “High Processing Computing (HPC)” chaired by Dan, “Scientific Code Testing” chaired by Janine, and “web services” chaired by Janine. During lunch break on Wednesday the students that had come to the conference were invited to a luncheon to provide an opportunity to converse and establish networks with NCAR/UCAR employees hosted by Stephanie Barr (Diversity Coordinator). This opportunity informed the students more about the educational and career pathways related to CS/software engineering.

 For the Duration of the rest of the conference there were many different tutorial workshops which ran simultaneously through the whole day. Software Carpentry was a two day workshop. The speakers were Camille Avestruz and Ted Hart, they instructed programmers on how to utilize Github to share and update script files in a community and getting programmers familiar with Python Programing software. Then on the final day there was a workshop on how to perform “Data Analysis with Python” presented by Monte Lunacek. He instructed on how to graph and do computational exercises utilizing Python.