Over the past few years, I have been working on a variety of open source software packages, some my own and some I contribute to. Throughout that process, I learned about software development best practices, code optimization techniques, user experience design, and a variety of other topics that I never received formal training in. At the same time, I have seen more and more interest in software development in my field, quantitative psychology, both from early career researchers and from researchers further in their career. One of the inspirations for starting this blog was seeing the various job ads come out in quant, many of which mentioned software development experience as a positive.
This is a big change from the perception of software development early in my graduate education, and a very welcome one. However, what I haven’t seen is formal training in scientific software development aimed at quantitative researchers. Best practices, tips and tricks, sticking points all tend to be shared informally. As such, this blog is a very small effort to get some information out about scientific programming for methodologists. I am planning on having the majority of posts be about issues that arise in open source software development, with maybe the occasional diversion into more statistical topics. I certainly hope that at some point in time people will want to guest post, and please, if you have a topic or some advice you want to give about scientific programming, send me an email!
Cheers,
Teague