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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 25 years in the industry here. As I said there’s nothing against learning something new but I doubt it’s as easy as “leveling up”.

    Both fields profit a lot from experience and it’s as much gain for a scientist do become a software dev as an architect becoming a carpenter. It’s simply not productive.

    there is so much time lost in research institutes because of shoddy programming

    Well, that’s the way it is. Scientific code and production code have different requirements. To me that sounds like “that machine prototype is inefficient - just skip the prototype next time and build the real thing right away.”


  • It’s always good to learn new stuff but in terms of productivity: Don’t attempt to be a programmer. Rather attempt to write better research code (clean up code, revision control, better commenting, maybe testing…)

    Rather try to improve cooperation with programmers, if necessary. Close cooperation, asking stupid questions instead of making assumptions etc. makes the process easy for both of you.

    Also don’t be afraid to consult different programmers since beyond a certain level, experience and expertise in programming is vastly fragmented.

    Experienced programmers mostly suck on your field and vice versa and that’s a good thing.





  • I find too verbose comments less annoying than no comments.

    Try to describe the bigger picture. Good comments allow understanding the current portion of the code without reading other code.

    Also add comments later if you find yourself having to read other code to understand the code you’re currently looking at.

    Comments are also a good place to write out abrevations/acronyms.

    Never optimize for sourcecode size.