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jsu comments on What are some science mistakes you made in college? - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: aarongertler 23 March 2014 05:28AM

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Comment author: jsu 27 March 2014 08:02:57AM *  3 points [-]

CS grad student here. Some mistakes I made were

  • Not documenting code.
  • Naming figures/datafiles poorly, so that you have no idea what they are in two weeks. It's best to have an automated way of labeling files if you'll be creating a lot of them.
  • Storing data in an inefficient way (very bad if you're generating large amounts of data).
  • Not using version control.
  • Diving right into implementing an algorithm without first thinking about whether that's the best way to solve the problem.
  • Being intimidated by tasks that looked difficult (they were rarely as hard as I thought they would be).