WallyToolbox
General tools I use everyday for everything.
About the toolbox
My name is Walter (CV) and I like writing about science and engineering topics. I have more than a decade of scientific computing experience and a broad experience with open source software, especially in the fields of fluid dynamics and gas phase kinetics; a little of it being shared here.
During the years I tried to different formats to organize my study materials and working tools, but it was only recently that I realized that coupling my knowledge base with the documentation of my personal code was the best approach in terms of maintenance. Obviously I cannot migrate all the content I have ever produced here at once, so my decision was to restructure everything and have a fresh start, feeding content as required, i.e. somebody asked me a hand in a certain subject or I need to refresh certain skill at work. In this page you will also find the supporting materials of my Medium articles and some additional content.
The core package of WallyToolbox ecosystem provides shared functionalities and types that are used in more specialized packages. It is an unpublished rolling release package composed of several sub-modules not making part of the main one and currently not following any versioning semantics. That means that new features are added and only the commits track differences. Its main goal is to provide a portable working environment that runs smoothly (at least) under Windows; anyone working in the numerical world knows the struggle with IT to have a proper Linux working system, especially in a portable device.
This unification over a central package allows for standardization of interfaces, employed quantities, and avoid boilerplate code. This page organizes everything (or tries to) to facilitate the understanding of the end-user.
Over the time it is expected that many functionalities from other modules will integrate WallyToolbox as they become stable. In some cases, entire modules may become sub-modules on integrated directly under WallyToolbox, so you might need to check where to import some utilities as this package is rolling release. This is temporary and will be modified when all the old code base that is giving origing to the package is migrated here, what will take me a few years. Nonetheless, the package will probably not be published to Julia registries because of the way its governance works. WallyToolbox.jl tries to be self-contained in several aspects because of the needs of perfect integration between functionalities of several of its foreseen end applications. That is currently incompatible with using some of the state-of-the-art packages from Julia ecosystem.
Using the modules
The simplest way to use WallyToolbox is by launching Julia the root directory of WallyToolbox.jl as a project from command line, such as julia --project=.[1]; this way one has access to most Julia modules packaged within the toolbox. Notice that for a full availability one needs to consider the extra steps provided in the setup guide, which is the preferred way to deploy a working system with WallyToolbox.
Contact and citing
For quick questions and proposals, please prefer Zulip Chat. If you found and error or bug, please create an issue. That will make me more efficient at handling everything. If none of those work for you, you can contact me by mail.
Found it useful? See CITATION.bib for the relevant reference.