DEV Community

Discussion on: Data Scientists and Software Engineering

Collapse
 
yssybyl profile image
Dr Janet Bastiman

Great post - I have a similar drafted somewhere. It's difficult seeing individuals coming out of academia without an understanding of how to fit into an engineering team.

Re the comments issue - for a data scientist making the transition to an engineer, comments are helpful. Going from a solo effort to a team effort and the mind shift of portability/reuse isn't going to happen overnight. Magic numbers, poorly named variables etc will sneak in occasionally. In my team, we accept this and so I encourage comments, particularly on the "clever hacks". When they get to a point that the comments aren't necessary then they get dropped.

I have an extra rule regarding git that I make sure I state explicitly: no developing in the master branch - it's easy to give a quick overview of source control and forget about branching :)