I have a tiny ass blog (somewhat by design) and I don’t anticipate this going very far, but part of me hopes it does.
Can we just take a moment to appreciate open source developers? Like. REALLY. I’m a scientist by trade, and when I’m not in the field doing what I actually love and am good at, I’m often in front of a computer trying to work through data analysis. I have picked up a little bit of Python coding knowledge to make that work easier. I can automate things; work through large sets of data faster than going by hand; do stats faster and more thoroughly than excel; make the ~* prettiest *~ plots; work with raster data! ETC.
But I can only do this BECAUSE there are these magical wonderful people out there on the other side of my computer screen putting gods know how many hours into making tools and packages and environments for me to apply to my data. So that I don’t have to code everything from scratch. Because I don’t know how to do that. I’m a rock person - not a computer scientist/engineer.
And the greatest thing is that because Python is an open source *community developed* language, my broke ass graduate worker self doesn’t pay a dime to use all of those resources. (I paid a few dimes to have a specialist teach me how to use them effectively, but you don’t have to! There are free textbooks and courses and teaching resources EVERYWHERE!) And this is all thanks to the dedicated folks out there who work on the Python language itself and build tools for others to use and benefit from and who do this all for free out of the goodness of their being because did I mention Python is completely free and open source.
I cannot stress how important this is for accessibility. It means I could mostly teach myself what I needed to know to use python (with the exception of the specialist knowledge that I paid for because I wanted a certification on top of the knowledge) on the internet for FREE. It means I still use Python and all the related tools and packages I need for FREE. I don’t have to pay the extremely expensive license fees for MatLab or ArcGIS products. I can process data and produce maps and charts and graphics for FREE. There’s still so many cost barriers to graduate education, academia, and publishing, but at least thanks to the open source nature of python I can make some of my knowledge available for free. And I can share my code! And help others! For FREE!
Anyway I just wanted to say thank you to the people out there who know how to develop coding languages and software and who do that for the benefit of the broader internet/science/learning community because I don’t know what I’d do without you. And this goes for everyone who does open source work! I just happen to use python most often. So! Yeah! THANKS CODE FRENS
