About Ben Weinstein

Feb 5, 2015 • Ben Weinstein

Hello everyone. I’m a PhD student at Stony Brook University studying hummingbird biogeography and community ecology. I currently live in Portland, Oregon.

My work involves a wide variety of technical platforms. I am interested in High Performance Computing in R and am currently working with the XSEDE Stampede cluster. My work also tries to bring tools from computer vision into biology (recent paper).

I am passionate about teaching R and Python, and designed/taught a course last year for graduate students in my dept.

I’m looking forward to learning alot more about evidence-based teaching!

What I found hardest about using Git the first time was… Understanding how to merge files using the command line! I use git frequently, but mostly as a version control, and at most with 2 or 3 other people working on separate files within the same repository. The social coding aspect is still a little hard to me, even after using git for a few years. In addition, my R workspace often exceeds the 100mb upload and causes pushes to fail. Removing a file from a past git commit is a difficult and annoying task.