The proverb “If You Want to Go Fast, Go Alone. If You Want to Go Far, Go Together” is also true for academic settings. No matter how good work you could do alone, chances are that you could achieve more if you find good colleagues to collaborate with. By collaborating…

The Open Source Initiative (or OSI for short), is a global, non-profit institution that promotes the adoption and awareness of open source software. Among other things, OSI curated the Open Source Definition (OSD) which describes the minimum standards that one software system needs to be “open source” (according to OSI…

The MIT license is one of the shortest open source license available out there. It has only 167 words, grouped into four paragraphs. Nevertheless, the MIT license is one of the most used open source licenses. …

In research, we generally start by gathering tons of data and running some analysis on them. You then write a draft about what you have found in your analysis, submit to a conference or journal, and, after it is accepted, hopefully the world will change based on your findings. In…

Academia can be a very difficult place. There is a fierce competition for an ever decreasing public research budget. There will always be someone, somewhere, with better equipment, better skills, better support, with more experience, etc. Your colleagues will always have more papers published and more funding raised than you…

No one works at full speed 100% of the time. Sometimes we are tired and we just want to spend some time browsing social network; and there is nothing wrong with it! However, when procrastinating online, try do so on Twitter. Indeed, Twitter could be a valuable tool to expose…

TLDR: We interviewed 30+ open source maintainers to gather their perception about what are the attributes that contribute to a great open source maintainer. We identified four groups of attributes: social, personality, management, and technical. We now want to understand if some attributes are more important than others. If you…

A critical thing about rejections is that they are part of the academic process. The chances are that every researcher you may know has already received one (perhaps many) rejection letters. Despite their well-known presence, we don’t talk much about rejections. …

Perhaps one essential part of the scientific endeavor is to communicate what you found in your research study to your academic peers. This communication starts when a researcher submits a paper to an academic venue (such as, a conference or a journal). …