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Showing posts from May, 2017

A Streamlined Workflow for Scientific Reproduciblility and Efficiency

As an undergraduate researcher, I was often unnecessarily bogged down by my poor workflow.  I consistently programmed "one off" scripts which sometimes turned into an important component of my research, and I was frequently frustrated by the way things were difficult to use.  My workflow improved a little when I got to grad school, but I finally decided to come up with a workflow that I could be happy with early this semester.  After collaborating with another student on a project and having a really hard time to integrate into his code, I decided I needed to come up with a good set of practices for my own sanity and for the sake of future collaborators as well.  While there is an initial upfront cost of using good programming principles, the long term benefits will usually outweigh the initial costs by a lot.  In this blog post, I'll summarize some key pieces to my new workflow.  If you are struggling with some of the problems that I mentioned then I hope you will find t