Using Git for Research
Jason Adams has a blog post titled 10 Reasons to Use Git for Research. Know anyone working in an academic settings? They may want to check it out. Academic settings…
Jason Adams has a blog post titled 10 Reasons to Use Git for Research. Know anyone working in an academic settings? They may want to check it out.
Academic settings impose different constraints on code base management. The goal is usually less about code quality and more about exploring possibilities. Academic code is often quite shitty, hacked together by some grad student(s), with dozens of false starts and changes in requirements. Trying to recreate previous experiments is often very difficult unless the grad student made previsions for such rollbacks. And if they have, it’s probably done in a way that seemed logical to the grad student at the time but is a nightmare for someone new to the project. There are ways to avoid this, by placing more of an emphasis on software engineering, but sometimes projects are so small or short-lived that it doesn’t seem feasible to trouble with that at first. And if you don’t even have a clear picture of where you are heading, it might not even be possible (though you are probably doomed to many problems in that case).
To help combat these issues, I will contend that every academic software project *must* use version control. Git makes that easy and here’s why.
Written by
Related posts
![](https://github.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Collaboration-DarkMode-2.png?resize=400%2C212)
2024 is the biggest global election year in history. What’s at stake for developers?
GitHub is considering what is at stake for our users and platform, how we can take responsible action to support free and fair elections, and how developers contribute to resilient democratic processes.
![](https://github.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/AI-DarkMode-2.png?resize=400%2C212)
GitHub named a Leader in the Gartner first-ever Magic Quadrant for AI Code Assistants
This year, as part of its annual Magic Quadrant series, Gartner published a first-of-its-kind report analyzing the state of play in the AI Code Assistants market–and named GitHub a Leader.
![AI in software development 2024 survey results with colorful graphics and percentages.](https://github.blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ai-survey-header.png?resize=400%2C212)
Survey: The AI wave continues to grow on software development teams
We surveyed 2,000 people on software development teams at enterprises in the U.S., Brazil, India, and Germany about the use, experience, and expectations around generative AI tools in software development.