Reproducibility is hard | The stupidest thing...

"Reproducibility is hard. It will probably always be hard, because it’s hard keeping things organized. I recently had a paper accepted at G3, concerning a huge set of sample mix-ups in a large eQTL study. I’d discovered and worked out the issue back in December, 2010. I gave a talk about it at the Mouse Genetics meeting in Washington, DC, in June, 2011. But for reasons that I will leave unexplained, I didn’t write it up until much later. I did the bulk of the writing in October, 2012, but it wasn’t until February, 2014, that I posted a preprint at arXiv, which I then finally submitted to G3 in June this year. In writing up the paper in late 2012, I re-did my entire analysis from scratch, to make the whole thing more cleanly reproducible. So with the paper now in press, I’ve placed all of that in a GitHub repository, but as it turned out, there was still a lot more to do. (You can tell, from the repository, that this is an old project, because there are a couple of Perl scripts in there. It’s been a long time since I’ve switched from Perl to Python and Ruby. I still can’t commit to just one of Python or Ruby…want to stick with Python, as everyone else is using it, but much prefer Ruby.) ..."