Tagged: Professional Development

Code review meetings?

Anyone interested in setting up meetings specifically for code review (rather than working through new problems or presenting techniques, which is more typical R Club)?

I’m thinking about this because I’ve been writing A LOT of code for my dissertation, and it’s all publicly available on my github repo — this is not the same as it actually being useful/interpretable to other researchers, though, which is my hope. I think I do a pretty good job of being consistent within my own code, but I’m thinking that’s really not enough to actually make sure other people will be able to understand it. Code reviews might help me, and others in the same boat, end up with code that is clearer and cleaner, and has gotten over the initial test of another person reading it and being like, “wait, what?”

So what I’m thinking about is a group of people who are all actively writing code for real projects (or have existing code from a completed project that they would like to clean up), and we meet to go through each others code and provide feedback about what’s clear and what’s not, and where to improve the code if it can be done better. We might want to have an initial meeting where we agree upon some style guides (a couple ideas of places to start: variable names in general, r code in particular, and as always, there’s an r package for that).

Interested? Leave a comment, or email me directly: rosem@uoregon.edu In a week or so, I’ll send around an email to interested folks so we can coordinate.

Industry Jobs

In this blog post, Paul Litvak, a Quantitative Researcher at Google (with a PhD. in Behavioral Decision Research), talks about life in industry.

Here’s one of his suggestions for launching a career outside of academia:

Learn some programming. R, then SQL, then Python, or some other scripting language. The more programming you learn the higher up the food chain you can go. If you know a lot of programming, you aren’t limited by what data exists, but only by what data you can create. This is hugely empowering, and increases your impact considerably. However, if all you learn is R, that is still incredibly useful,and will still get you into a variety of jobs. (emphasis added)