Reflectus
I’d like to start playing the sax again. I’d also like to get to the gym a couple of times a week, and write some more children’s books, and tear up the paving stones in our front yard so that we can put in a garden, but you probably don’t care much about that. If you’re reading this blog, though, I hope you will care enough about what I hope to do after I’m done at the University of Toronto to help me make it happen. Funding would be nice, as would pointers to potential sources of funding, but what I need most at this point is a reality check—your thoughts and comments would be very welcome.
So: I’m involved in a lot of things right now, but the three that matter most to me are (in order):
- Software Carpentry, a crash course in software development for scientists and engineers;
- Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects, which gives students from universities in Canada and the US a chance to work in distributed teams on term-long software engineering projects; and
- a collection of essays on evidence-based software engineering that will be published by O’Reilly in 2010.
The second and third are unlikely to turn into full-time jobs, and I’m not even sure I want them to. At this point in my life, what I really want is to make a difference to the world my daughter will inherit, and I think my best shot of doing that is to help scientists do more research with less effort. As I’ve argued many times, teaching them basic software development skills will have more impact than any amount of petascale this or parallel that. The problem is finding someone to fund me for 12 months while I upgrade the existing course so that it can be used for self-paced study over the web. I have a plan; all I need (for some value of “all”) is half a dozen donors willing to kick in $20-25K each to cover salary, travel, video production, and what-not.
I’ve given up on getting government funding through conventional channels (I’m 0 for 5 on applications), and unfortunately, most companies doing the computational side of computational science are only interested in backing showcase “big iron” stuff (because hey, it makes sense to ask scientists to parallelize code before they even know how to modularize or test it). With 139 days on the clock as I write this, I’m open to (practical) suggestions…
How about consulting to companies while reworking the material? Go where the money is. It’s not very secure though.
~Matt
@Matt I’ve done consulting before; in my experience, its deadlines always take precedence over those of personal projects, so the latter are repeatedly pushed back.
What about getting hired on at another university, teaching the course and developing the next version simultaneously?
Ever since I first discovered Software Carpentry, I’ve hoped for a way to get it introduced as an optional course for first year engineering and science students. Maybe if I’m still here after I complete my PhD I’ll have a chance to do something about it (other than pester professors, which is what I’ve done so far).
@Jay Sure, if you can find another university in the Toronto area that will hire me to teach and improve it
Hey Greg.
I love what you do (especially software carpentry), and I agree that it is much more important to try to teach people known software-engineering techniques, than to promise more advances on muddy grounds. But nobody seems to want to fund this… For actual funding you could try and talk to William Stein (Sage), or see if you can get some help from the people who promote reproducible science. Maybe training to companies would also be a way to get some money in. Companies sometimes understand better the need for good practices.
Good luck
@Gael Haven’t tried SAGE for funding; pointers to specific people in the reproducible community who might have money to spend would be welcome. Ditto for training companies.
If you could partner with a UK University there might be a possibility via JISC funding?
@David Sure, I’d be happy to partner with anyone — are you interested in anchoring at your end?