Programming Languages

Organized Code Repositories Accelerate Science and Facilitate Reproducubility

March 2, 2021
Pratik Sachdeva, Ph.D.

Computational and data-driven research increasingly requires developing complex codebases. At the same time, many scientists don’t receive training in software engineering practices, resulting in, for some, the perception that scientists write terrible software. As scientists, good software should accelerate our work and facilitate its reproducibility. While building good coding practices takes some time and experience, it doesn’t require a...

Visuals for Everyone: An Exercise on the Importance of Intuitive Data Visualization

March 30, 2021
Daphne Yang

A couple years ago, I took an undergraduate biostatistics course here at UC Berkeley and vividly remember one of the first discussion section activities on interpreting data and visualizations. From this activity, I learned about why, as data consumers, we must always be aware of not only what visualizations are really representing but also understanding where the data is really coming from. While this might seem obvious, this has been one of the most valuable lessons as an aspiring data scientist/enthusiast. I learned the importance of analyzing and understanding data with...

Projects as a Learning Tool

April 6, 2021
Emily Grabowski

Let’s say you’re new to programming, or maybe you’ve coded before but you’re tackling a new concept. You’ve read a blog post or taken a workshop, and have a general sense of what is going on. But how do you take this to the next level? One of my favorite ways to dive into a new technique is to simply try it out.

With coding, learning by doing is one of the best ways to improve. When I started learning Python, I took a class where I did homework assignments involving coding small games and algorithms. While these were useful for general coding, I wanted to dig in to the...