This is part of an open-ended series of marginalia to Donoho’s 50 Years of Data Science 2015 paper.

In many scientific labs, the skills and knowledge required for the research (e.g. linguistics fieldwork, sociological interview practices, wet-lab biological analysis) are not the same skills involved in software engineering or in data curation and ( Read more... )

I’ve written a half dozen pieces of commentary on David Donoho’s work, all the while spelling his name wrong; at least once in a permalink URL. Oh, well.  At least I can edit the posts here.

Mirrored from Trochaisms.

This is part of an open-ended series of marginalia to Donoho’s 50 Years of Data Science 2015 paper.

Many aspects of Donoho’s 2015 “greater data science” can support scientists of other stripes - and not just because “data scientist is like food cook” - if data science is a thing after all, then it has specific expertise that applies to shared ( Read more... )

Some wise thoughts from my complementary-distribution doppelganger Bill McNeill, currently occupying our ecological niche in Austin:

IDE-independence has a lot of advantages.

IDEs are Code Smell

Mirrored from Trochaisms.

Hey, nifty. I just found out that you can write RMarkdown-style literate Python files and use the Jupyter notebook environment to view and execute them (with the notedown package, which also allows you to edit them in place).  This has nice implications for source control - changes to ipython notebooks are pretty ugly.

Mirrored from Trochaisms.

There’s a fairly tidy - but imperfect - correspondence between the three wh’s and the relational skillsets I proposed yesterday.

• how corresponds well to the tooling skillset
• what roughly corresponds to the data stewardship skillset
• … leaving why to correspond to the collaboration skillset, which seems apt: why do data science if you don’t have ( Read more... )

tl;dr: The tech frame of “lean startup”, venture capital funding, “exit strategies”, and relentless “valuation” talk is fundamentally anti-human for nearly all of us.

[ETA (immediately after publication):]

Startup idea: They are treated like bees; they are robbed of the honey they make.

- Hottest Startups (@HottestStartups) May 16, 2016

The ( Read more... )

Apropos of this collaboration model thinking, I note that Doug Cutting is looking to “rock band” after all.

Mirrored from Trochaisms.

To quote Wikipedia: an anti-pattern is:

a pattern used in social or business operations or software engineering that may be commonly used but is ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice. [emphasis mine]

I’ve been exploring patterns for actually working on software - not for designing it - and I realized that I myself spent a lot of time ( Read more... )

Here’s my favorite collaboration pattern so far: the Bank Heist collaboration pattern. This pattern, which we know from The A-Team, Ocean’s 11 and Leverage, among others, shares many properties with an excellent developer team:

• You don’t have to like following orders to be on the team.
• Everybody’s a generalist, and an expert in one area (pickpocket ( Read more... )