A data science cookiecutter

[sfmig]

Is Your Feature Request Related to a Problem? Please Describe

We recently chatted with @samcunliffe and Niko from SWC (cannot tag him) about a cookiecutter for data science / scientific analysis / exploratory Python projects.

The idea would be to have some lighter requirements than for a fully-fledged Python package. And maybe some data science specific additions (like for example functionality for formatting and checking notebooks). This could be useful for many researchers, and maybe a good entry point to getting into good software practices.

Describe the Solution You'd Like

If we find this could be useful, we could have it:

• in a separate repo, or
• as part of this repo, and ask the user in the initial config phase which version they want to instantiate. @samcunliffe mentioned we could maybe use hidden variables for this.

Alternatively, we can just point to a good cookiecutter for this purpose if that already exists.

Describe Alternatives You've Considered

There are some examples of research cookiecutter:

• this one is very basic (mostly a directory structure) but maybe a good starting point if we decide we want to implement this ourselves.
• this one seems more recent and quite well documented. It may be a good one to point to if we decide that doing one ourselves is out of scope

Additional Context

No response

[samcunliffe]

A minimal solution would be to add a couple of trusted/tested data science templates to The Templates Page. I'd propose a section above "Community-specific..."

[sfmig]

this website and the associated cookiecutter may be a nice one to try out

[paddyroddy]

this website and the associated cookiecutter may be a nice one to try out

Does feel a shame to be recommending a rival 🤔

[samcunliffe]

this one seems more recent and quite well documented. It may be a good one to point to if we decide that doing one ourselves is out of scope

I heard good things about ccds. Never actually used it. Should we ask in #datascience on Slack? If we're making a recommendation under the ARC logo, perhaps they should be consulted.

[dstansby]

(like for example functionality for formatting and checking notebooks)

This sounds like something we could add here anyway?

[paddyroddy]

This sounds like something we could add here anyway?

👍 #49