ByteSized RSE: Project Management with GitHub

Research Software Engineering (RSE)

I recently appeared on an episode of Peter Scmidt’s excellent Code4Thought podcast, where I was part of a conversation around GitHub tools to help manage a large research software project.

Project Management with GitHub

For the last few years, I’ve been working on a project called Colouring Cities, which is a large, international research project collecting data about the buildings in our cities. In my time on the project, it has grown to working with over 100 collaborators in more than 20 institutions in countries all around the world.

But that raises the question of how to manage a large team of collaborators, particularly when they’re in different time zones. How do you assign and manage tasks, communicate and keep track of progress?

Fortunately, my predecessors on the project had encouraged the PI to use GitHub, not just as a code repository, but as the main hub for information and collaboration for the project. We use Wikis for documentation, issues and project boards to track the status of various tasks, and automation to run checks on the code and to automatically add new issues to the project boards.

In short, the tools on GitHub have been instrumental to the management of the project, and I talk about that in the episode.

Listen

You can listen to the full episode on:

Or your preferred podcast platform. Just search “Code4Thought”.

More

I’ve also talked about this topic at a few events recently:

  • I gave a talk where I reviewed various project management features in GitHub in the context of the Colouring Cities project at RSECon23. You can watch the full talk on YouTube.
  • I was also involved in a workshop/panel session at RSECon24, where I spoke about how project management tools can be used for ourselves – not just to make ourselves more productive – as well as Task Management for Humans as Self-Care and the plans for what would become my SSI Fellowship. You can watch it on YouTube.