When I started grad school in the Fall of 2011, I didn't consider myself to be an excellent programmer or a hacker or anything like that. On the other hand, I did consider myself to be an exceptional googler and tinkerer; I could usually scrounge up a solution to my current programming problem without much difficulty.
My first research project in grad school involved a javascript-heavy experiment that we were going to deploy to Mechanical Turk. I had done my fair share of tinkering with client-side (HTML/CSS) and server-side (Rails) web development, but I had always avoided javascript. No, I don't know why.
Eager to show my collaborators that I was capable of writing code that worked and writing it quickly, I dove into javascript's prototypical deep end. My code, hideous as it was, worked fine and allowed for rapid iteration.
Just to expand on the aforementioned hideousness, we're talking a whole mess of global variables and inline HTML:
$('body').prepend('<span id="codespan"><strong>Enter your code: </strong><input style="display: inline" id="turkcode" type="text" name="turkcode"></input><button id="codebutton">Submit</button></span>');
Oh dear.
My intention isn't to call out how bad I was at javascript a year and half ago. I was inspired by the process. That project necessitated that I build a web app, but my projects since then have been more flexible. But all of my (and your, I'm guessing) research collaborators have a somewhat unbelievable number of devices that can access the web, so ideally, my research should live on the web instead of in some C++ or Java code that may not ever be compiled on anyone else's machine.
This idea of web-first research manifests itself it a number of ways:
- Whenever I'm building an interface, I will try to make it a web app
as opposed to a native GUI.
- Remote collaborators can see what I'm working on without downloading and compiling code, getting the proper libraries installed, debugging platform-specific issues, and so on.
- Everyone wants scientists to release their code. Once published, web-based projects are easy to disseminate because they're already running in-browser.
- For each project, I maintain a private website to track progress, results, and ideas. If someone misses a meeting, they can just check the site to see what's going on.
- I like learning new programming languages and frameworks. The web is constantly evolving, so I have the opportunity to learn and extend tons of cool web-related technologies and tools. So far in grad school: web.py, flask, django, node.js, SQLAlchemy, dojo, jQuery, jQuery UI, underscore, coffeescript, docpad and many more. Being able to learn these tools while I'm doing my research is a highly-motivational mixture of work and play.
- Rapid iteration for the web is, well, rapid. This applies to high- level languages in general. Sure, algorithms are going to run a bit slower, but only invest the time in highly optimized implementations if your research depends on it.
Web-first research doesn't make sense for all areas of research, but I encourage other graduate students (HCI and otherwise) to think about these things as they're working on projects.