As many other researchers and good friends before me, I started to learn programming in Python. And obviously, I began from some short on-line courses like the one on Codecademy, but as you progress, you need to distance yourself from ‘foos’ and ‘bars’ and think of the ways to apply newly acquired knowledge to your research. At this point you search the Internet for examples, blogs, documentation like crazy, and if at the end of the day you have found exactly what you were looking for - great! However, sometimes it is not the case, and here is when having a group of colleagues from your university, who use Python in their research too, could be beneficial.

Luckily, a couple of months ago the UEAPY group was established at UEA. Since then every week we meet to share our experience with Python, and here I summarised my contribution to one of the meetings. That day we discussed using new Python string formatting for assembling simple text files needed to run KPP. This post was inspired by the wonderful Python scripts of Dr Paul Griffiths.