Progress Report

Hi all,

During this last three weeks I have been mainly designing, implementing, debugging and running tests for the brain tissue classification code. It is tough because you have to think of all possible options, input arguments, noise models that the end user may end up trying. I have learned a lot during this period, mainly because I have never tested any code so thoroughly and it has also come to my attention the importance of this kind of practice. You realize how “fragile” your code can be and how easy it is to make it fail. This has been a true experience of how to develop really robust software.

Although my mentors and I decided to not move forward to the validation phase until having finished the testing phase, we decided to refactor the code (in part to make it also more robust as I was saying before) and to cythonize some loops that were causing the code to be slow. This has also been a interesting learning experience because I am practically new to cython and the idea of writing python-like code at the speed of C seems fascinating to me.

I am planning to post more detailed information about the testing throughout this weekend. I will be working on finalizing this phase of the project the next couple of days and jump directly to the validation step.

Keep it up and stay tuned!