Stop making spaghetti (code)

With an increasing number of academic journals requiring authors to submit code, an increasing number of researchers developing R packages, and more open source packages requiring maintenance, the list of R programming skills required of early career quantitative researchers is ever growing. Many of these researchers don’t have backgrounds in computer science, but find themselves writing code and developing software on a daily basis. They don’t always have supervisors with backgrounds in computer science either. So how do we help students go from writing spaghetti code, to working with good software development practices?

In this talk, I’ll outline what training is currently offered to PhD students, gaps that have been identified (often by students themselves), and a suggestion of how we can better prepare PhD students for quantitative research so that none of them say “If I knew then what I know now, I would have done things entirely differently.”