Best practice in Science and Coding. Holding up a mirror.
If we think about what makes science work; effective communication, continual testing and refinement, public criticism of claims and ideas; the things that make up good science, and mean that I had a laptop to write this talk on this morning, that meant the train and taxi I caught actually run, that, more seriously a significant portion of the people in this room did not in fact die in childhood. If we look at these things then we see a very strong correspondence with good practice in software development. High quality and useful documentation is key to good software libraries. You can be as open source as you like but if no-one can understand your code they’re not going to use it. Controls, positive and negative, statistical and analytical are basically unit tests. Critique of any experimental result comes down to asking whether each aspect of the experiment is behaving the way it should, has each process been tested that a standard input gives the expected output. In a very real sense experiment is an API layer we use to interact with the underlying principles of nature.
Good stuff, and it mentions dexy!