{"id":6758,"date":"2017-11-20T16:03:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-20T21:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=6758"},"modified":"2017-11-20T16:03:39","modified_gmt":"2017-11-20T21:03:39","slug":"keeping-a-lab-notebook-webinar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=6758","title":{"rendered":"Keeping A Lab Notebook Webinar"},"content":{"rendered":"

I came across a nice Webinar on keeping a laboratory notebook<\/a>. It’s from the National Institute of Health and is therefore aimed at medical researchers and the type of labs they work in. Still, there are, I think, valuable lessons for those of us in software engineering even if we don’t work in a formal lab setting. <\/p>\n

I’m a big believer in keeping a notebook that contains the same sort of information discussed in the Webinar. I record problems I work on and the steps I take to solve (or try to solve) them. Naturally, I keep mine electronically in Org mode. I try to use the method recommended by Howard Abrams in his really great video on Literate DevOps<\/a>. I’m not doing DevOps but I really like his approach of embedding the code he used to solve a problem in an Org file that explains the problem and what he’s doing to try to solve it. That’s especially useful if the problem comes up again because I have working code that solved it last time. <\/p>\n

If you have to fill out activity reports, keeping a lab notebook provides an excellent record of what you’ve worked on and\u2014if you track your time\u2014how long you worked on them. It takes a bit of discipline to keep an accurate and comprehensive lab notebook but is well worth the effort. <\/p>\n

The video is a little over 13 minutes long so you may need to plan some time for it. If you’d rather, you can read the slides and associated narrative<\/a> instead. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I came across a nice Webinar on keeping a laboratory notebook. It’s from the National Institute of Health and is therefore aimed at medical researchers and the type of labs they work in. Still, there are, I think, valuable lessons … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18,37],"class_list":["post-6758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs","tag-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6758"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6759,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6758\/revisions\/6759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}