Welcome to My New Blog

I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for a while now, and as we approach the new year, it feels like the perfect time to finally take the plunge. So here we are—my very first blog post.

What This Blog Is About

This space will be dedicated to scientific programming, a field that sits at the fascinating intersection of software engineering and scientific computing. Whether you’re writing code to analyze experimental data, simulate complex systems, or build tools for research, the quality of your code matters just as much as the science behind it.

I plan to explore topics that help us write better, more maintainable scientific software. Some areas I’m particularly excited to dive into include:

• SOLID Principles: These five principles of object-oriented design can transform how we structure scientific code, making it more flexible and easier to test.
• Design Patterns: The Gang of Four patterns offer elegant solutions to common programming problems, and I want to explore how they apply specifically to scientific computing contexts.
• Testing Scientific Code: From unit tests to validation against known results, I’ll explore strategies for ensuring your computational work is correct and remains correct as your code evolves.

Why Scientific Programming Needs Better Software Engineering

Too often, scientific code is written once, runs once, and then becomes a mystery even to its original author. We’ve all encountered those 2000-line scripts with variable names like temp2 and comments that say "this works, don’t touch it." But as computational work becomes central to modern science, we need to approach our code with the same rigour we apply to our experiments.

What’s Coming

In the posts ahead, I’ll be sharing practical insights, code examples, and lessons learned from applying software engineering principles to real scientific problems. My goal is to make these concepts accessible and immediately useful, whether you’re a researcher who codes or a developer working on scientific applications.

Thank you for joining me at the start of this journey. I’m looking forward to exploring these topics together and learning from the conversations that follow.

Here’s to writing better code in the new year!

Stay tuned for my next post, where I’ll dive into the first of the SOLID principles and why it matters for scientific code.