[John Pormann] has been involved with research and scientific computing for quite some time, mostly focusing on high-performance and parallel computing (would love to see Software Carpentry get into the basics of that at some point!). I’m currently heading up the Enterprise Services group with Duke University Library’s IT department.
Throughout my career, I’ve seen a lot of “bad” code – code that was written by biologists, geneticists, even engineers. Generally it was “bad” because they didn’t get credit for writing good code, they get credit for doing good science (as it should be). Helping them restructure or rewrite code was always a wonderful, fun, positive experience.
I’m looking forward to learning to how to improve my teaching so I can help researchers stop worrying about code and keep their focus on the science.
What I found hardest about using Git the first time was…
… getting the initial configuration set up correctly, particularly the need for an upstream master (git remote add upstream) to be able to pull down new changes from the main branch.