Docker allows this project to be developed, tested and maintained on a variety of operating systems without modification.
Docker runs the reporting in a container, automatically handling pre-requisites such as Python and third-party libraries.
There is no need to install specific pre-requisites on the host machine, aside from Docker itself to run the application within a container.
It doesn’t matter whether you use Windows, Mac or Linux as your OS. The reporting will run fine thanks to the magic of containers!
WSL 2 is the recommended backend for Docker Desktop on Windows but it also allows Linux commands to be run natively:
WSL is incredibly useful and brings the power of the Linux command line to Windows.
The application code has been written entirely in Python due to its high productivity and wide choice of third-party libraries.
This project used Jupyter Notebook as the IDE. This is a popular choice for data scientists but less so for software developers.
The project will probably migrate over to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code at some time in the future.
Git is the most popular version control system in use today, suitable for small and large projects alike.
This project is entirely open source and the repository (source code, data and documentation) is stored on GitHub.
The web pages for Weymouth Speed Week results are hosted on GitHub Pages due to it’s native integration with GitHub.