scicoder

I spent most of the day at scicoder, Demetri Muna's workshop for astronomers who code. I spoke about the practice of building academic software systems—pair coding, functional testing, and using packages vs writing your own—and then went to lunch with a small group. On the writing your own point, I said that it is a good idea to both write your own and use pre-built packages, because you learn so much by writing your own, and you get so much performance out of (well built) industrial-strength code (though you can use your own if performance isn't a problem). Partly my remarks are motivated by the point that academic programming is about learning, not just shipping. In the afternoon, Muna taught us about using R for browsing data and making plots. Tsalmantza and I wrote all of our heteroscedastic matrix factorization stuff in R, so I was already a believer, though Python is my one true love.