Programming Tips
The majority of the work we do is really engineering, not science. We spend many more hours writing code to get and analyze our data than sitting down with the data itself, which isn’t to say that we don’t spend a lot of time with our data, simply that that the coding aspect is unfortunately more time consuming. And really, this is why we set up this tutorial in the first place. If the code were easy, why would we have a McCode Academy?
When one is already spending so much time just getting things to work, it can be hard to commit to doing more work to improve the quality of one’s code, too. We’d like to throw in our two cents on this, both encouraging you to put in that extra effort and also give you some tips so that writing good code is easier.
Here’s the road map for the brief story we’re going to tell you:
Further Reading
If you don’t need convincing/motivation to write good code, we’ve got some resources that we’ve found useful as we think about how to write good code.
First, we also want to point out the many tutorials by the Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI). They have tutorials on:
- Programming Best Practices
- Object-Oriented Programming
- Code Style
- Git and Github
- Testing,
- Software Design Patterns
Second, Google has many useful resources for their own developers:
Finally, there’s no better way to learn than to see what other people have done. And there’s probably no better resource for that than Stack Overflow. Unfortunately, Stack Overflow also has a bunch of terrible examples, so to help you avoid those, here are some people whose answers we’ve found useful in learning: