The Third Bit

Content is good. But don’t just read the slides!

I watched your video. I liked it, but I have the curse of knowledge—I already know what you’re trying to say.

“Mission: Help scientists be more productive by teaching them basic computing skills”
The mission sounds good. Sums things up quite nicely. I was wondering, what do scientists get from increased productivity? More time doing science? Fewer hours at the office/lab? Mission: show scientists how to be better programmers so they can spend more time

“The problem is that scientists spend 40% of their time wrestling with software”
“The problem is that 95% of them are self taught”
These sound more like statistics, but yeah—it’s pretty easy to make the connection to problems.
The problem is that scientists waste time wrestling with software because they don’t have the right training. Sort of like programming the time on a VCR without reading the manual—you’ll get it done, but it’s slow an painful (I’m old—I can refer to things like VRCs)

“Take too long, build things that are already build, don’t know how to verify correctness”
This one hits the nail on the head. There are three parts: time, duplication, correctness. Would most scientists view all three as must-fix? Or would one or more be nice-to-fix?

“Solution: short, intensive workshops with self paced online learning”
Where do I sign up!

“Benefit: more confidence in results + higher productivity”
Correctness was left out of this slide. If your value prop is 1. time 2. duplication 3. correctness, does it make sense to talk about correctness here too?

“Workshop offer the basics”
If they spend 40% of their time programming, do they already know the basics? What about: workshops offer best practices and must-know skills/tools.

“More depth online”
This one sounded like more breadth online.

Cool video. If you put more cats in it, you’ll probably get more views…