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How do you suggest they begin to bridge the gap between their entry level skills and those of someone with four years of studying and many (I assume) of work ex

How do you suggest they begin to bridge the gap between their entry level skills and those of someone with four years of studying and many (I assume) of work experience? Or would it be better to simply have a go to person to help create and optimize these programs?

knolan 9y ago
The ‘go to person’ is probably the best bet, most researchers are willing to learn new things so hopefully this would lead to improvements. I saw this formalised in a group in KTH where a person’s job was to help researchers and students get the most out of their computational resources. A bigger problem is the stop start nature of software development in academic research. Students and postdocs come and go and tools are frequently abandoned to the new inexperienced student or are kept frozen in time on that one old machine that still works. Many researchers are simply afraid of coding. We recently had a student from my former lab interview with us and he presented all his Ph.D results captured and processed in a tool I wrote several years earlier. It had seen zero development even though the commments through listed possible improvements. I doubt anyone even looked at the source code because it just worked and he had no idea I had wrote it even though my name was in the header comment.
austinpray 9y ago
I was to “go to person” for my university’s natural language processing research group. I built a database and accompanying REST API for bulk loading audio and transcription data for one of their projects. I was quite pleased with it. When it came time for the researchers to submit transcripts I had the pleasure of reviewing probably the worst python program I have ever seen. 1) The request JSON was manually built using strings and string substitution. One immediate bug I saw was that the researcher forgot to wrap one of his keys in quotes. `{key: “val”}` is not valid JSON of course. 2) The python program did not actually make the web requests. It generated curl commands as strings and then printed them to std out. 3) The researcher then took all these generated curl commands and evaled them. You seriously can’t make this stuff up.

knolan 9y ago

The ‘go to person’ is probably the best bet, most researchers are willing to learn new things so hopefully this would lead to improvements. I saw this formalised in a group in KTH where a person’s job was to help researchers and students get the most out of their computational resources. A bigger problem is the stop start nature of software development in academic research. Students and postdocs come and go and tools are frequently abandoned to the new inexperienced student or are kept frozen in time on that one old machine that still works. Many researchers are simply afraid of coding. We recently had a student from my former lab interview with us and he presented all his Ph.D results captured and processed in a tool I wrote several years earlier. It had seen zero development even though the commments through listed possible improvements. I doubt anyone even looked at the source code because it just worked and he had no idea I had wrote it even though my name was in the header comment.

austinpray 9y ago

I was to “go to person” for my university’s natural language processing research group. I built a database and accompanying REST API for bulk loading audio and transcription data for one of their projects. I was quite pleased with it. When it came time for the researchers to submit transcripts I had the pleasure of reviewing probably the worst python program I have ever seen. 1) The request JSON was manually built using strings and string substitution. One immediate bug I saw was that the researcher forgot to wrap one of his keys in quotes. `{key: “val”}` is not valid JSON of course. 2) The python program did not actually make the web requests. It generated curl commands as strings and then printed them to std out. 3) The researcher then took all these generated curl commands and evaled them. You seriously can’t make this stuff up.