Do Research Like a Munchkin

I would like to share this initiative from two former postdocs,
that moved in industry and in particular software development.
They offer this online course (at low price) on coding and project management
for postdoc and researchers.

best
Claudio

Do Research Like a Munchkin
We are two Computational Physicists who moved out of academia to work in Software
Development. Here, we have been exposed to practices that enable us to optimize resources
and to have fruitful team collaborations. Our workshop “Do Research Like a Munchkin”
(a.k.a. Software Development Practices Applied To Computational Research) is our attempt
to introduce computational researchers to our novel vision of how Scientific Computing can
benefit from such Software Development practices. The two main keystones are:

• Clean Code

  Researchers are usually well trained at reducing code running time. However,
  typically they are not equally trained at reducing the time spent to write and
  maintain the code. This is somewhat ironic, considering the constant evolution of
  the code used in research. There are several Software Development practices that can help to reduce the writing and maintaining time. We want to mention a few:

  • The Test Driven Development discipline. This helps to make the code robust and flexible. It works like magic.
  • The Git version control system. This gives you total control over your code evolution and, above all, enables effective development collaboration.
• Agile Project Management

  It is a common belief that project management does not make sense in pure research
  because its development is unpredictable. Interestingly, the same condition is true
  in Software Development, where customers’ requirements change unexpectedly. This
  created considerable struggles, but eventually a working mode able to deal with it
  emerged: Agile. Its benefits are:

  • enhance the ability to respond to changes
  • keep under control the project with simple and lightweight techniques
  • boost of motivation and therefore productivity

Clean Code and Agile are two sides of the same coin. We are convinced that using them in
synergy is extremely beneficial to research.
With this vision in mind, we have designed a workshop for researchers that will help them
build a solid foundation on these topics through plenty of interactive sessions and
exercises.

https://the-munchkins.gitlab.io/do-research-like-a-munchkin/index.html