When I was in grad school, I wrote a lot of code which ended up biting me later. It wasn’t until I got a job as a software engineer at Google that I discovered better ways of organizing code. Writing reusable, easy-to-read code is a core skill to have when you’re spending half of your grad school days in front of the computer.

I realized that others might be interested in learning these core skills, and so I tweeted out a feeler, and I was really overwhelmed with responses. I gave a workshop to the grad students in neuro at Harvard, then at NMA 2021, and it seemed to really hit a nerve. I took a couple of weeks off to write a long-form version and went through several rounds of editing and improving, and now it’s finally ready for primetime. Enjoy!

The Good Research Code handbook

About the tech behind the book: it’s all writing in markdown. Jupyterbook takes care of translating markdown to html. I heavily customized the sphinx-book-theme template to use tufte.css to make it look and feel like a book. A nice bonus is that tufte.css has a dark theme that’s easy on the eyes. The project is hosted on Github and deployed through netlify.