Python

55 articles · Latest March 26, 2026

eScience Editorial Team·Mar 26, 2026

Bring Your Own Backend

A pattern for sustainable research software collaboration By Stefan Verhoeven. Image source https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/new-nationwide-modeling-points-widespread-racial-dispari...

Patrick Bos·Sep 25, 2025

Be like Jurriaan

Write copy-pasteable READMEs for developers The main message of this post is short: Thank you, Jurriaan H. Spaaks , for including developer’s READMEs in the zenodraft and the zenod...

Bart Schilperoort·Apr 22, 2025

Keeping your scientific data files small

Keeping your scientific data files small An RSE’s guide to NetCDF compression If you’ve ever watched a crawling progress bar while transferring research data, or received a dreaded...

ole·Feb 21, 2025

A Helpful Noob

Photo by Keiteu Ko on Unsplash Introduction Yesterday, my colleague Faruk asked me to conduct a Hallway Test for the NLeSC/python-template he is working on: he just grabbed me off...

Peter Kalverla·Dec 10, 2024

Amsterdam as seen by a weather model

Visualizing local climate zones in 3D with the Cityblocks package What sets a weather model apart from a video game? While video games prioritize stunning visuals over strict reali...

eScience Editorial Team·Dec 3, 2024

Tackling Advent of Code

By Ewan Cahen Advent of Code 2024 has started this week! If you are not familiar with Advent of Code, it’s an annual coding challenge created by Eric Wastl. It’s like an advent cal...

eScience Editorial Team·Nov 26, 2024

From Pandemic Response to Package Development

By Fenne Riemslagh We had the pleasure of sitting down with Kirsten Bulsink, a data scientist at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). Our disc...

Lourens Veen·Nov 7, 2024

Variables, Records, Values and Objects

14 The Engineering Corner A blog-within-a-blog on the transition from writing simple scripts for yourself to writing larger programs with and for others. TEC appears on an irregula...

Candace Moore·Oct 3, 2024

The magic of teaching about the anti-magic of generative AI

On the use and abuse of generative artificial intelligence by students Photo by Owen Beard on Unsplash Recently, I taught the pilot workshop Medical Image Processing in Python. The...

Peter Kalverla·Sep 5, 2024

(Un)wieldy workflows with WRF

(Un)wieldy workflows with WRF Streamlining experiments with the Weather Research and Forecasting model The Weather Research and Forecasting model, WRF for short, is a beautiful pie...

Lourens Veen·Aug 1, 2024

Scripting vs. Programming

Lourens Veen·Apr 26, 2023 SubscribeRemember me for faster sign in Any remaining differences are usually due to particular features supported by certain languages. In R for example,...

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Lourens Veen·Jul 5, 2024

Better scripts with typing

1 The Engineering Corner A blog-within-a-blog on the transition from writing simple scripts for yourself to writing larger programs with and for others. TEC appears on an irregular...

Lourens Veen·Jul 5, 2024

Procedural Programming

The Engineering Corner A blog-within-a-blog on the transition from writing simple scripts for yourself to writing larger programs with and for others. TEC appears on an irregular s...

Sander van Rijn·May 14, 2024

Python’s timeit: Find the fastest code in no time

Trains are fast, and your code should be too. Or is it the other way around? — Photo by LUM3N on UnsplashEvery programmer wants their programs to run a little faster. While optimi...

Flavio Hafner·Feb 27, 2024

How to manage your IP address in Python

> This post is the first of a series of blog posts arising from a collaboration between the eScience Center and the ODISSEI Social Data Science Team. You can find this text also at...

eScience Editorial Team·Dec 12, 2023

How to ensure that others can run your code

6 By Julian Gonggrijp This blog was originally written for the Utrecht University (UU) website by Scientific Programmer Julian Gonggrijp. We enjoyed this useful blog post, and hope...

Peter Kalverla·Nov 21, 2023

Cracking the (moisture) tracking code

An exclusive interview with our project partners This post is part of a series on our 2021 Small Scale Initiative Call in Software Performance Optimization. This week’s highlight:...

Pablo Rodríguez-Sánchez·Nov 9, 2023

Automatic differentiation from scratch

A surprisingly simple and elegant way to teach your computer how to perform derivatives, with some Julia (and Python) examples Photo by Crissy Jarvis on Unsplash First, a disclaime...

Ji Qi·Nov 6, 2023

How Easy It Can Be to Whip Up Your Own Orange3 Widget: A Chatbot Adventure with HuggingChat!

4 Are you ready to dive into the captivating world of Orange3 widgets and unleash your inner chatbot whisperer? 🚀✨ Whether you’re a coding connoisseur or a newbie explorer, develo...

Kody Moodley·Nov 2, 2023

The Orange3 data mining platform for the Social Sciences and Humanities

The Orange3 data mining platform for the Social Sciences and Humanities Why aren’t more SSH researchers using and extending the platform? Orange is an open-source Python-based data...

Stef Smeets·Jun 20, 2023

Reduce, reuse, recycle: save the planet one GitHub action at a time

Reduce, reuse, recycle: save the planet one GitHub action at a time 53 Written by Stef Smeets and Sander van Rijn. Photo by Ralph (Ravi) Kayden on UnsplashAsk any environmentalist...

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Johan Hidding·Feb 2, 2023

Diversity in Software: four ways to think different

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash Diversity in Software: four ways to think different Diversity is a hot topic. Let’s talk about diversity in Software. Hackers need to wake up an...

Florian Huber·Jan 31, 2023

Build a mass spectrometry analysis pipeline in Python using matchms — part II: Spec2Vec

After “part I” which gave an introduction on how to import, process, and analyze a tandem mass spectra dataset using Python and matchms, “part II” will add Spec2Vec to the game, a...

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Florian Huber·Jan 31, 2023

Build your own mass spectrometry analysis pipeline in Python using matchms — part I

Python is a very powerful language and brings the potential for designing computational mass spectrometry analysis workflows of any desired type and complexity. Here, you can find...

eScience Editorial Team·Aug 2, 2022

Our favourite Python tools for research

Photo by Ethan Robertson on Unsplash Ah, summer. A time to relax, go on holiday, and learn new things. At the eScience Center, we love summer. And we love Python. So, for summer,...

Sonja Georgievska·May 13, 2022

Reusable software in the era of AI: why sometimes you must reinvent the wheel

> In traditional software development, reinventing the wheel is a cardinal sin. But AI has changed the picture. In AI-based software development the traditional reusable components...

Stef Smeets·May 4, 2022

Forget about Jupyter Notebooks — showcase your research using Dashboards

SubscribeRemember me for faster sign in The snippet below generates some data (a normal distribution), fits it, and creates a matplotlib plot out of it. It takes three parameters,...

Elena Ranguelova·Mar 21, 2022

How to find your Artificial Intelligence explainer

Here, we will use the LRP method to illustrate the principle of determining which features in an input contribute most strongly to the output of a trained DNN model. In this exampl...

Peter Kalverla·Feb 21, 2022

Storyboards for science communication

A modern publication format for the hybrid metaverse Originally used by movie directors, a storyboard consists of a series of images that, together, form a story. In the European...

Abel Soares Siqueira·Feb 11, 2022

Can Python with Julia be faster than low-level code?

Part 3 of the series on achieving high performance with high-level code Here comes a new challenger: It is Julia. Photo by Joran Quinten on Unsplash ( https://unsplash.com/photos/M...

Abel Soares Siqueira·Jan 19, 2022

How to call Julia code from Python

A three-part series on achieving high performance with high-level code Caption: Astronaut carrying Python and Julia. Photo by Brian McGowan on Unsplash ( https://unsplash.com/photo...

Stef Smeets·Jan 5, 2022

What is in the eScience toolbox: Stef on his favourite meshing library

Question: Hi Stef, for this blog series we are looking to highlight our developer’s favourite libraries. Stef: As research software engineers we always get excited by tools that ex...

Sven van der Burg·Dec 21, 2021

Still coding texts by hand for social science text analysis? Use Doccano instead to speed up the process!

Sven van der Burg·Dec 21, 2021 SubscribeRemember me for faster sign in Coder-centered: It is designed to make the coder’s life as easy as possible. You view one text at a time at t...

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Faruk Diblen·Dec 3, 2021

cffinit: NOW is the time to get more recognition for your software!

Creating software citation files using cffinit by Abel S. Siqueira and Faruk Diblen (Netherlands eScience Center) Modified photo of a cinema by Jake Hills on Unsplash https://unspl...

Pablo Rodríguez-Sánchez·Sep 29, 2021

Decorators in R

Decorators have been made quite popular by Python but, did you know they also exist in R? Photo by Lenny Kuhne on Unsplash Decorators are typically used to extend the behaviour of...

Peter Kalverla·Sep 20, 2021

Plotting gridded data on a web map: Python and/or Javascript?

SubscribeRemember me for faster sign in But what if you want to plot your own data? While there are many resources on how to use existing tile or web-map services, I struggled to f...

Adriënne Mendrik·Jun 14, 2021

#KonMari for Science? Tidying up Provenance…

The term provenance mostly originates from the art world, where it aids in authenticating historical objects. > “The primary purpose of tracing the provenance of an object or entit...

Robin Richardson·May 31, 2021

(Nano)Publish your research with Python

Using nanopub, a high-level, user-friendly python interface to the nanopublication network SubscribeRemember me for faster sign in For example, if you want to e.g. search for all n...

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Patrick Bos·Mar 5, 2021

Automate chores with GitHub Actions

How I keep my Heroku web-app’s data up-to-date automatically Scientists, open source developers, and basically probably most people, have to deal with one common obstacle in life:...

Felipe·Feb 22, 2021

A Quick and Dirty Pytest Cookbook

SubscribeRemember me for faster sign in As an alternative to the above snippet, you can install and run the pytest-mypy-plugins. Testing the documentation Testing the documentation...

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Patrick Bos·Feb 19, 2021

Twitter Bots, for Science!

How to build a bot to show Covid-19 vaccination progress Twitter bots have a really bad rep. Troll armies, spam, fake news… You name it, a bot’s done it. But what if we could harne...

Patrick Bos·Nov 10, 2020

Coalition polls for the people with Coalitiewijzer

Build interactive web apps with polling data, Voilà & Heroku My first attempt at actual visualization was to make another grid, but this time consisting of 150 HTML widgets, on...

eScience Editorial Team·Oct 27, 2020

C++ web app with WebAssembly, Vega, Web Worker and React

SubscribeRemember me for faster sign in To generate the Vega-Lite specification we can write a function like so To wrap the Vega-Lite visualization in React component we will use u...

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eScience Editorial Team·Oct 9, 2020

Interact with your C++ web app using React forms

By Stefan Verhoeven, Faruk Diblen, Jurriaan H. Spaaks, Adam Belloum, and Christiaan Meijer. In a previous blog post, we compiled the C++ algorithm into WebAssembly. In the current...

eScience Editorial Team·Oct 9, 2020

Spice up your C++ web app with visualizations

By Stefan Verhoeven, Faruk Diblen, Jurriaan H. Spaaks, Christiaan Meijer, and Adam Belloum. In a previous blog we found the root of an equation using the Newton-Raphson algorithm i...

eScience Editorial Team·Oct 9, 2020

Using C++ in a web app with WebAssembly

By Stefan Verhoeven, Faruk Diblen, Jurriaan H. Spaaks, Adam Belloum, and Christiaan Meijer. Let’s say you have some C++ code laying around that you would like to make available to...

Netherlands eScience Center·Jun 8, 2020

Evidence for the importance of research software

● Recognising the importance of software in research: Research Software Engineers (RSEs), a UK example — Study is a case study that discusses the current challenges faced by RSEs a...

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Florian Huber·Feb 11, 2020

Workshop Machine Learning for Research 2020 … did it work?

Evaluating our one-week hands-on workshop on applying machine learning to research. 5 Stimulate diverse teams and be aware of (gender-)biases.We wanted to attract diverse teams and...

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Johan Hidding·Jan 16, 2020

Parallel programming in Python

SubscribeRemember me for faster sign in Depending on your level of Python expertise, you might implement such an algorithm in different ways. In an introductory Python course we co...

Pablo Rodríguez-Sánchez·Dec 16, 2019

Experiences of a computational evangelist

What I’ve learned spreading the gospel of computational best practices among scientists Photo by NESA by Makers on Unsplash Just a few days ago, I gave a talk at the FAIR (Findable...

Johan Hidding·Jul 2, 2019

why all you’ll ever need is markdown

an introduction to Pandoc Photo by Daniel McCullough on Unsplash Markdown is widely used for writing up documents. It is supported by many blog engines, GitHub readme, you name it....

Patrick Bos·May 23, 2019

democracy

Dimensional reduction. Who doesn’t love it? Everybody does! On that note: EU election week! Time to map our complex individual preferences to one of a few packages of lumped togeth...

eScience Editorial Team·Nov 29, 2018

nice hydrographs for everyone from everyone

“Nice hydrographs! Can you now compare your model to ‘that other hydrology groups model’?” The phd student suppresses the urge to roll her eyes. Her supervisor is asking her to go...

Janneke van der Zwaan·Aug 1, 2018

jump start your python project with this template

Spend less time creating high quality software Use our python template to build better software. At the Netherlands eScience Center, we believe that better software leads to better...

Vincent van Hees·Sep 11, 2017

10 ways to keep your successful scientific software alive

Imagine, you invest a lot of time and energy in the development of a piece of scientific software. The work pays off and scientists start to use your software in their research. Ho...