Bioinfo Blog!

The authors of programming4scientists have published a nice blog post with several tips on how to avoid distractions while programming:

• programming4scientitst – Stay on target!

I think this is a major issue for all people working in bioinformatics, because compared to the classical computer scientist, we bioinformaticians have less culture on this topic, and generally there is less perception on which are the good practices on programming.

One classical example is the position of the monitors and how to sit in front of them:

most of the bioinformaticians programs in a no-ergonomic position - you can program better just by sitting more comfortably in front of the computer.

When I was still a master student and was looking for a place to start a phd, I was literally paranoic by this picture, because of every laboratory I visited as candidate, I found that the majority of the monitors where positioned wrongly. It’s a kind of non-sense: is the ‘publish or perish’ mentality so strong that we don’t even have the time to care about how we sit in front of the computer?

Well, going back to the argument of this post, I think that the tools linked by programming4scientists can be very useful; however, the most effective way to avoid distractions is to work in a good team, and to interact with your team mates.

If you work on your project alone and never speak with your supervisor, you are more likely to waste a lot of time with distraction; but if you have clear objectives, and you have a clear focus on what you have to do every day, you will be a lot less likely to distract.

I think it is responsability of the group leader to help his students to avoid distractions, and to keep them always focused on a task. If I got distracted and go slower on my work, it is because I don’t have a clear idea of how or what to do next, and I don’t have nobody to ask it. At this point many people will say you that if you are a true scientist you must be able to carry your own project alone, but for me this sounds like an excuse or a lie.

There is a whole science who studies how to coordinate a group of programmers, and it is called ‘software engineering‘.

A good methodology which can give good results is pair programming. I like more or less all the rules from the extreme programming phylosophy, also the ‘5 minutes stand-up meeting every day‘ could be effective in the short term.