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Testing in Radio Astronomy with Python and pytest

Episode #405, published Fri, Mar 3, 2023, recorded Mon, Feb 13, 2023

So you know about dependencies and testing, right? If you're talking to a DB in your app, you have to decide how to approach that with your tests. There are lots of solid options you might pick and they vary by goals. Do you mock out the DB layer for isolation or do you use a test DB to make it as real as possible? Do you just punt and use the real DB for expediency? What if your dependency was a huge array of radio telescopes and a rack of hundreds of bespoke servers? That's the challenge on deck today were we discuss testing radio astronomy with pytest with our guest James Smith. He's a Digital Signal Processing engineer at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory and has some great stories and tips to share.


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Links from the show

GPU-based correlator for MeerKAT: github.com
Meerkat: sarao.ac.za
SARAO: sarao.ac.za
Skarab server: peralex.com
pycuda: documen.tician.de
Commercial Telescopes: telescope.com
PyLaTeX: github.com
Linearity Test Code: talkpython.fm
Correlator Context: talkpython.fm
Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com
Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm

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