Development

Jamie and I had lunch last week with Greg Wilson, who has done yeoman's work getting students to use software productivity in research. Along those lines, I thought I might be able to offer up a some advice on how to make your life easier as a student in a scientific field.

I recently stumbled upon an issue that, provided the correct circumstances could prove to be slightly troubling. Recently, I had to deal with multiple versions of a test project I'd been working on. I had to store a few things to be loaded at run-time, and saved on close. Doing this, I saved a few things to the project settings. However, upon changing the versions (installing an update) the settings were lost, as a new file was generated for the latest version. Perplexed, I turned to the internet. After a shockingly large amount of searching, I finally happened upon some code that helped.

Okay, bad attempt at a literary allusion.

But it's a question that we've been talking about around here, and to a lesser extent with some of the folks we know: where are the scientific programmers?

As Mini reported, Microsoft has finished shipping Microsoft Layoff 2009, to middling response. Microsoft laid off roughly 5% of their workforce in an effort to appease Wall Street and improve their stock price.

Jamie and I had the pleasure of going out for dim sum with Greg Wilson the other day. You might remember Greg from such classics as Science 2.0 and Stack Overflow Dev Days Toronto. He was talking to us about his Software Carpentry course that he's been running out of the University of Toronto and University of Alberta.