I will probably write this up in a better blog post, but in the meantime I
can provide my own experience.

I submitted a paper describing my own software that had been available for
over a year (categoryCompare, package:
http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/categoryCompare.html,
paper
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fgene.2014.00098/abstract).
To address the reviewers concerns, I created a branch of the git repo
specific to the paper,
https://github.com/rmflight/categoryCompare/tree/paper, and made a git repo
just for that analysis (https://github.com/rmflight/ccPaper). The analysis
was fairly involved, and required writing over 500 lines of new code, over
2 branches. Over the 2-3 months I revamped that paper and the results,
there were at least 2 times that I would have been completely lost without
version control, and the ability to keep track of changes and reset to a
working state, or branch from it.

It has taken me a while to learn and become good at it (6+ years, and I
still don't commit like I think I should), but I can't imagine not having
it now. Has it been painful? Yes! Has it been worth it? Definitely.

-Robert

Robert M Flight, PhD
Bioinformatics Research Associate
Resource Center for Stable Isotope Resolved Metabolomics
Manager, Systems Biology and Omics Integration Journal Club
Markey Cancer Center
CC434 Roach Building
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY

Twitter: @rmflight
Web: rmflight.github.io
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8141-7788
EM [email protected]
PH 502-509-1827

To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more
than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say
what the experiment died of. - Ronald Fisher

On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 4:11 AM David Martin (Staff) <
[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> > We need to do better at emphasizing that these are skills that need to
> be developed early and often, and not when you're in the middle of trying
> to complete a project.
>
> The "Why do I need to learn to swim? I'll wait till I am actually drowning
> otherwise it is a waste of time" approach.
>
> ..d
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