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The brutally honest answer would be that I prioritize its development above everything else. I have no idea if this is sustainable in the long term, but I don't

The brutally honest answer would be that I prioritize its development above everything else. I have no idea if this is sustainable in the long term, but I don't plan on slowing the development down as long as I have an income. When I was finishing my PhD I turned down several industry opportunities for fear of having to stop development. I am currently a (tenure track) assistant professor but increasingly worry about academia's lack of respect for library development.

kxyvr 11y ago
At this point, I don't think it'll help you, but about a decade ago, COIN-OR was put together to partially provide an organization that helps give academics a place to peer review and receive credit for the codes they generate (http://www.coin-or.org/ http://www.coin-or.org/). The other reason was to provide a place to host open source optimization codes before things like Github became popular. Now, did it every really live up to that promise? Not as much as I'd like. Honestly, after IBM purchased ILOG, it looked like their support dropped off pretty significantly and IBM was always the largest backer. That and a number of key people retired. In any case, there was just an election, but I know they're still looking for people to help drive the organization forward. As an assistant prof, it's a risk, but perhaps one worth looking at at least in the sense of what some kind of organization with moderate backing looked like that was trying to give academics better credit for their codes.
- math_and_stuff 11y ago
  This is a great point. I'm an outsider in the optimization and OR communities (having started out in HPC linear algebra) but have a lot of respect for what I've seen from COIN-OR.
robotresearcher 11y ago
Library development is respected in CS, as long as you have a real community using the code so you can demonstrate impact. AND as long as you also graduate some grad students, write some papers, win some grants, do some service, and teach some classes decently well. You signed up for those things with the job and you can't substitute library development for any of them. It's up to you if you want to do it as well, and it might even be the best way for you as an individual to make impact, but you can't skip any of the traditional things. Well, you could try, but it's pretty risky. My advice is to get the other things done enough that you can't be criticized for them, and also kick ass in software if that's your passion. No one said it would be easy. /end unsolicited advice from greying software-heavy professor.
- math_and_stuff 11y ago
  Too bad I'm not in a CS department. But, on a serious note, when I asked this point-blank at an orientation for new professors, the response from a senior EE professor was "never work on anything that won't lead to a publication". Unfortunately, as you're well aware, that isn't how open source projects work, but that is the perspective of many senior academics outside of my area (and likely software altogether) that will have loud opinions around tenure time. I'm well aware that this is what I've signed up for, but I'm also keenly aware that many postdocs that are both academically and software-engineering capable can easily convince themselves that this isn't the cold truth.
  - robotresearcher 11y ago
    Can you write solid papers about the software? If it's original and impactful, you ought to be able to write about it. Journal editors can be happy to receive papers about popular and widely-used software, since the articles are likely to be cited a lot. Your happy users write nice reviews and everyone wins. Some colleagues and I edited a special issue of a journal that had only papers-about-or-with-software and it was pretty well-received. That way I got to do service to my software-heavy colleagues too, with decent credibility due to my own well-known software. Tenure points all round.
    - math_and_stuff 11y ago
      There are definitely top-notch journals largely serving this purpose. And I know several academics tenured via such a strategy. I'll refrain from writing a wall of text on this, but my main point would be that the current objective function largely has a blindspot (open source software as intrinsic scholarship), and that overloaded people tend to be forced to optimize their critical path to "success". And software is decidedly not in the critical path, as you have mentioned.
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    > many postdocs that are both academically and software-engineering capable can easily convince themselves that this isn't the cold truth. Thanks, this (and your other answers) is very useful. I'm about to finish my PhD, and have a recently open-sourced code I've written that's also a bit tangential to my PhD work (it's for molecular dynamics, "raaSAFT" on Bitbucket/PyPi). It may be easier for this type of code, though, in the sense that it's an application rather than a library, but I am aware that I may have to down-prioritize working on it in the short-term. (I'm not in CS either.)

kxyvr 11y ago

At this point, I don't think it'll help you, but about a decade ago, COIN-OR was put together to partially provide an organization that helps give academics a place to peer review and receive credit for the codes they generate (http://www.coin-or.org/ http://www.coin-or.org/). The other reason was to provide a place to host open source optimization codes before things like Github became popular. Now, did it every really live up to that promise? Not as much as I'd like. Honestly, after IBM purchased ILOG, it looked like their support dropped off pretty significantly and IBM was always the largest backer. That and a number of key people retired. In any case, there was just an election, but I know they're still looking for people to help drive the organization forward. As an assistant prof, it's a risk, but perhaps one worth looking at at least in the sense of what some kind of organization with moderate backing looked like that was trying to give academics better credit for their codes.

math_and_stuff 11y ago
This is a great point. I'm an outsider in the optimization and OR communities (having started out in HPC linear algebra) but have a lot of respect for what I've seen from COIN-OR.

robotresearcher 11y ago

Library development is respected in CS, as long as you have a real community using the code so you can demonstrate impact. AND as long as you also graduate some grad students, write some papers, win some grants, do some service, and teach some classes decently well. You signed up for those things with the job and you can't substitute library development for any of them. It's up to you if you want to do it as well, and it might even be the best way for you as an individual to make impact, but you can't skip any of the traditional things. Well, you could try, but it's pretty risky. My advice is to get the other things done enough that you can't be criticized for them, and also kick ass in software if that's your passion. No one said it would be easy. /end unsolicited advice from greying software-heavy professor.

math_and_stuff 11y ago
Too bad I'm not in a CS department. But, on a serious note, when I asked this point-blank at an orientation for new professors, the response from a senior EE professor was "never work on anything that won't lead to a publication". Unfortunately, as you're well aware, that isn't how open source projects work, but that is the perspective of many senior academics outside of my area (and likely software altogether) that will have loud opinions around tenure time. I'm well aware that this is what I've signed up for, but I'm also keenly aware that many postdocs that are both academically and software-engineering capable can easily convince themselves that this isn't the cold truth.
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  Can you write solid papers about the software? If it's original and impactful, you ought to be able to write about it. Journal editors can be happy to receive papers about popular and widely-used software, since the articles are likely to be cited a lot. Your happy users write nice reviews and everyone wins. Some colleagues and I edited a special issue of a journal that had only papers-about-or-with-software and it was pretty well-received. That way I got to do service to my software-heavy colleagues too, with decent credibility due to my own well-known software. Tenure points all round.
  - math_and_stuff 11y ago
    There are definitely top-notch journals largely serving this purpose. And I know several academics tenured via such a strategy. I'll refrain from writing a wall of text on this, but my main point would be that the current objective function largely has a blindspot (open source software as intrinsic scholarship), and that overloaded people tend to be forced to optimize their critical path to "success". And software is decidedly not in the critical path, as you have mentioned.
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  > many postdocs that are both academically and software-engineering capable can easily convince themselves that this isn't the cold truth. Thanks, this (and your other answers) is very useful. I'm about to finish my PhD, and have a recently open-sourced code I've written that's also a bit tangential to my PhD work (it's for molecular dynamics, "raaSAFT" on Bitbucket/PyPi). It may be easier for this type of code, though, in the sense that it's an application rather than a library, but I am aware that I may have to down-prioritize working on it in the short-term. (I'm not in CS either.)