Who This Site Is For
You
If you want to learn coding, congrats, this site is made for you! If you are a professional level IT person, you might find some of the content rather basic, but if you are looking to build your coding skills from scratch or learn how to apply them to a plethora of real-world problems, you should feel at home here. And if you happen to be a scientist, well, do I have something for you!
Now I happen to be a chemist who always felt that his subject and his education are dragging decades behind what is happening out in the real world. I decided to change that. In my research, but also in the skills I am building. And so I taught myself to code, obviously, with a lot of help from the usual platforms (shout-out to StackOverflow!). But I couldn’t help noticing the complete lack of platforms that make it easy for scientist to learn programming, all while I meet many others in science who want to learn, but are hesitant. Or who try to learn but struggle with the IT jargon. Or who should learn but haven’t recognized it yet. This webpage is my effort to help all of those.
What’s going to land here
The main focus here will be Python. The language is simple and widely used with many packages (think of those as add-ons) for scientists. I will show you Python code YOU CAN USE, in a strict no-nonsense approach. To get you started, there will soon be an Absolute Beginners Tutorial and later you will find tutorials for solving typical problems faced by scientists and explanations for some more elaborate code examples that I use frequently.
But if you thought Python is everything you need to know, sorry, I have to disappoint you right away. As a scientist you are likely accustomed to having to learn quite a few different tools, methods, instruments, etc. to get the thing you want done. Often, it will be similar in your coding experience. Your Python doesn’t help you much if the source code of a very useful tool recently published in your field was written in Bash. Or the instrument you have to access speaks only Java. Or you have dig into Blender to render a frontispiece that doesn’t resemble the work of an 8th grader for your publication. So in addition to Python, as a scientist you will need the basics of a range of tools. Take a look around and find something useful!