March 4th Dev Session

[tpike3]

When: 4 March --- 2000 UTC+8/1300 CET/1200 GMT/0700 EDT

Where: via Matrix

Proposed Agenda:

• Mesa 1.2 (History and Release)
• Mesa 2.0
• Mesa-Geo

@jackiekazil @rht @Corvince @wang-boyu @Tortar @aiwhoo @nunezco2 @EwoutH @Logende Please feel free to add or takeaway from this agenda

[tpike3]

Dev Session Notes

• Mesa 1.2.0 Taylor: @jackiekazil is going to finish the history and do the release; we noticed that the README regarding resources was out of date (Update resources in README #1605) and was fixed and merged)
• Mesa-geo @wang-boyu is continuing to make improvements and is about to do another release. Coincidentally, a user posted and is using mesa-geo for dredging monitoring in Houston (very cool)
• Complexity Tutorial
  - We reached 100 enrollees (hooray)
  - Updated the link to the mesa-examples folder so it went straight the Sugarscape G1mt
  - Work to get Session 2 completed
• GSOC
  • @rht recommended do put out an email to our academic network and in discussions to get students to register as participants in GSOC
• Mesa 2.0
  • Mesa 2.0 has following 4 areas
    1. Improve grid to help optimize Mesa. A major part of these improvements @rht and @Tortar have been working a cynthonized version. The outstanding question is should the cython version be the standard for mesa or should it be a separate library. The benefits are if it is the same then less maintenance and development overhead, but with a potential cost to users who may want to adapt the grid. @tpike3 is tasked with reaching out to the network and conducting a 1 question survey to get their feedback.
    2. Improve read the docs. Update the comments to ensure the APIP renders appropriately fix errors and make it more readable
    3. Improve CI
    4. Update DataCollector to allow agents of different types.

[tpike3]

Per the dev session we want to get feedback from users on the way forward for Mesa 2.0 and cython of the space.py

Please let me know if you have any comments on the below before I post and send out to the academic network.

---

One Question Survey:
Mesa is working to make Mesa faster. To do this our developers @rht and @Tortar have built a cython version of space.py that gives variety of speed ups.

The question, should the cython version be part of standard Mesa as the default build or should it be a different install?

Costs and Benefits:

• The benefits of being part of the standard library, the speed ups will be in Mesa by default.
• The cost is that if users want to extend space.py and make their own customizations for some specific need, it will be harder to do this.
• The additional challenge would be if Mesa has space.py and cython space.py it would increase the overhead on maintianing and developing Mesa.

(Please let me know by 8 March and then I will initiate the survey)