3 ms·

I wonder how hard it would be to find CRAPL (or otherwise open-sourced) research code that one would be able to contribute to (as a software engineer) in order

• peatmoss 14y ago
  That's an interesting question. I'd guess that most code born of academia has a rather short half life in terms of immediacy for the author. However, the benefit of having any sort of second pass look at anything from a software engineer's perspective would be a major boon. You might have better luck in a quasi-research public venue. For example, I work at a public agency that uses your tax dollars to forecast travel demand, and then use the results of that statistical modeling (plus a thick shmear of political wrangling) to decide how to spend more of your tax dollars. Much of this model code is developed as part of an honest to goodness research process (yay!) by contract software developers that public agencies can afford (not so yay). In other words, things like revision control and unit tests are mostly dismissed as extravagances and unwarranted delays. Validation that is performed doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I'm betting there are a million and one of these kind of projects. Some of us are trying to figure out internal and external issues so we can post this sort of thing on places like GitHub. Others are already there. If you pick a topic you're interested in, and ask the right people, it'll probably be worth some authorship cred.