Best practices - MESA Summer School 2025

This repository was used to develop the materials for the Thursday morning lab at the MESA summer school 2025 in KU Leuven.

The official online tutorial is available here, and the associated lecture was given by @AldanaGrichener.

The local copy of the instructions for the lab are at ./Instructions.org exported in markdown format at ./Instructions.md.

Tentative lecture plan

Best Practices

Debugging

Loosely based on this documentation.

Open science & reproducibility

Maybe make checklist to consult

• e.g., Farmer et al. 2020 → Mehta et al. 2022
• zenodo (refer to guidelines):
  • minimal work examples (→ how to ask a good question on the mailing list)
  • data: profiles and history
  • postprocessing scripts
  • README mapping figure/result ↔ scripts ↔ data ↔ code
• give proper credits in your citation
  • input physics
  • algorithmic implementation
  • all code papers
• consider “donating time” to help others:
  • reply to mailing list
  • open an issue on gitHub
  • open a PR on gitHub
  • share your custom tools, make your science reproducible!
• Bonus: MESA contrib

Developing

• compare inlist ignoring order, comments, nesting, and defaults

Requirements

MESA 24.08.1 (tested with MESA SDK “x86_64-linux-24.7.1”)

How to test

Use one core by running

export OMP_NUM_THREADS=1

Useful references

Relevant MESA documentation pages:

• Best practices
• Debugging

Contribute back ready-to-use routines:

• MESA contrib

Tooling:

• compare MESA inlist