Software Engineering For Scientists

The importance of software to science has grown tremendously over the past 20 years. Proper use of standardized Software Engineering techniques, such as cloud computing, testing, virtualization, testing, and source control, is often necessary for high-quality, and replicable science. Software Engineering for Scientists is designed to help researchers, scientists, and non-domain-experts gain hands-on knowledge of the tools and practices that will make your day-to-day work more efficient and less error-prone, be it in academia or industry. Students will learn to adopt the most important and germane of the techniques used in the real world (from startups to large companies), and we will provide you with a good understanding of the tools, approaches, and tradeoffs inherent in writing any kind of program. The class is taught by an expert with 20 years of experience building software, managing engineering and product teams at companies including Google and Twitter who now works primarily in biotechnology and a Professor in the Biomedical Data Sciences with more than 30 years of experience teaching in bioinformatics at both Stanford and UCSF. Pre-recorded lectures will be provided and will cover topics from both a theoretical and practical perspective. In person lectures will be primarily interactive; we will spend time answering students' questions and talking about how these learnings could be useful to their research. There will be a number of assignments and a final project which can be based on students' existing research.