Code/Astro 2023-2025 Workshops at Northwestern

Software development is a foundational pillar of astronomy, and will only increase in prominence as astronomical datasets grow and the community moves toward open-source code. However, astronomers generally lack any formal training in software development, a key issue that has been identified by the Astro2020 Decadal Survey (see its Section 3.2). To help remedy this, we have now hosted the Code/Astro workshop for two years. This workshop aims to give astronomers at all career levels the knowledge, skills, and practice to write open-source, tested, bug-free code to enable accessible and reproducible science. By the end of the workshop, the participants will produce an open-source Python package that does some task in astronomy. The workshop also serves as a networking and career-development opportunity for the attendees. The community demand for this kind of workshop is already apparent: this year alone, we were only able to accept 100 of the 230+ applicants for the workshop. Next year, pandemic-allowing, we are looking to host another 100-person Code/Astro workshop, but to move to a hybrid format to improve networking and community-building, with ~50 in-person attendees. We will continue to have remote attendees given that we received strong feedback from this year’s workshop that this improved accessibility, especially for international attendees.