This is the fifth report of the ‘Publishing on OpenWetWare’ series. In brief, I am writing an article on OWW from start to finish: initial writing -> collecting comments -> publishing on arXiv.org -> presenting at a conference. For other articles, see one, two, three,four. In this report, I’ll share my experiences in presenting the work at Pycon 2008.

Creating the Presentation

Creating the presentation was not too difficult, especially since I used the general outline for the article as the outline of the talk. I could also use the same code snippets in the talk, with some minor modifications. You can see the talk slides here.

The Presentation

The talk was well attended (about 200 people), and there were questions about other tools that one could also use in python for science. It looks like there is a small community of scientists using python that come to Pycon regularly.

There is also a group of people interested in bringing some of the good coding practices offered by python to more scientists. There are also a lot of general software development tools such as unit testing and source code management that not only make the scientific programming task easier, but also promote good scientific practice. I am hoping that Python - All A Scientist Needs will be the first of a series of articles on good programming practices for scientists. I’m also hoping that we can write these articles with the same process (OWW -> arXiv), and make OWW into a respected publishing platform.

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