Coding Confessions: Celebrating the SSI #CollabW21 Hack Day runners-up!

On 1st April, Train­er on Research Data Man­age­ment and Open Sci­ence, Eiri­ni Zorm­pa, attend­ed the 3‑day Soft­ware Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Institute’s Col­lab­o­ra­tions Work­shop. Dur­ing the Hack Day, the team Eiri­ni was a part of won sec­ond place for their project ‘Cod­ing Con­fes­sions’. The addi­tion­al team mem­bers were Col­in Sauze (team lead), Patri­cia Her­t­erich and Dave Hors­fall. 

Why Coding Confessions?

Cod­ing Con­fes­sions is an ini­tia­tive to encour­age trans­paren­cy about cod­ing errors (sins, if you must). Writ­ing code is a huge part of doing research, but many researchers are self taught. Inevitably, this leads to mis­takes. At the same time, the pre­vail­ing research cul­ture can make it very dif­fi­cult for peo­ple, espe­cial­ly ear­ly career researchers, to admit to mis­takes. Anec­do­tal­ly, embar­rass­ment over messy code and fear of mis­takes being found is often cit­ed as a rea­son not to share code. Under­stand­ably, this fear is mag­ni­fied in peo­ple who may already feel unwel­come or like they don’t belong in acad­e­mia. By mak­ing admit­ting to cod­ing errors main­stream, we hope to make acad­e­mia a more for­giv­ing, inclu­sive place. We also hope to low­er the bar­ri­ers to code shar­ing and stop the same mis­takes from being repeat­ed by oth­ers.

What is Coding Confessions?

At the moment, Cod­ing Con­fes­sions is a web­site and blog that’s very much under con­struc­tion. One way we offer to con­fess to cod­ing errors is by writ­ing a blog post which we pub­lish on the web­site. We encour­age senior aca­d­e­mics, who per­haps want to set an exam­ple, to write such a post. We believe this is a great way to help change the research cul­ture. We assume that most peo­ple who are afraid to share their cod­ing errors are junior researchers that may have legit­i­mate rea­sons to remain anony­mous. For that, we have cre­at­ed a google form to facil­i­tate anony­mous sub­mis­sions.

We also think Cod­ing Con­fes­sions have great poten­tial as events! These could be run as Light­ning Talks, actu­al con­fes­sions (with a booth, why not), or just a notice­board with short anony­mous admis­sions.

What’s next?

We built the web­site in about 5 hours so there’s still some finess­ing to be done. We’ll be work­ing on the web­site next and think­ing about ways to run Cod­ing Con­fes­sions events.

If you want to get involved, you can do that by sub­mit­ting issues on our GitHub repos­i­to­ry. We also cur­rent­ly have only one sub­mis­sion (Read Eirini’s con­fes­sion here!) and it’s get­ting lone­ly… So if there’s any­thing you want to get off your chest, you know what to do!

For more infor­ma­tion about this project or how to get involved con­tact Eiri­ni!