Hey there,

It’s great to be back in your inbox! Since it’s been a while since you heard from me, your interests may have changed. Feel free to hit this button to subscribe so I’m not clogging up your inbox.

Right as I was sending out the last newsletter in August, life got complicated. I had to put the newsletter on hold. I’ve also been trying to finish a few papers that got started because of the things I was talking about on YouTube. If anything the time away from the newsletter and videos have reinforced how much I love doing them. I’m so grateful to the folks who reach out and said they missed hearing from me. That’s why I said in December that for 2024 I was going to return to putting out content. Obviously, I missed my January 1 start. But I started telling people who could hold me accountable that starting March 1, Riffomonas was going to be a priority. I figured if I told enough people - and the right people - they would look very disappointed at me. Well, here I am.

Over the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about how I can help you to be more effective in your data science. I want you to be able to produce analyses that are more robust and reproducible. I think you can do this without having to send out your analysis to a collaborator or a service.

But to achieve this vision, I have grown to appreciate that I have two primary audiences.

First, there are the folks who are putting fingers to keyboards to process experiments, run analyses, generate figures, and write papers or put together slide decks. Let’s call this person John. John is a person that I might think of as being part of “my lab”. So far, I have produced videos and workshops for folks like John. The biggest honor John and any of you could pay me is to think of me as a mentor - a virtual supervisor, committee member, or advisor.

I will continue to help the Johns of science by putting out regular YouTube videos and workshops. I’m also planning on running group programming sessions where John and his peers can work through exercises together to strengthen their reproducible research skills.

The second audience that I have in mind is John’s supervisor, advisors, or committee members. Let’s call this person Peggy. I see Peggy at faculty meetings, study sections, and editorial board meetings. Peggy stops me in the hallway to ask my opinion about a figure her lab made. She has a broad vision of where her research is going. Although she certainly has a set of unique skills, she is unlikely to write code herself and can’t keep up to date on all the great tools to make her groups’s research more reproducible.

One of the challenges that Peggy faces is that she doesn’t know how to mentor John. She doesn’t really know what code should look like. She don’t know how to supervise people sitting at a desk rather than a laboratory bench. I want Peggy (and John!) to know what good code looks like, even if they don’t know how to program. I want Peggy to know the questions to ask John so that she have more confidence in his work. I am someone that Peggy can trust to perform an audit of her group’s data science practices and make suggestions about what is going well and what could be improved.

To get things going, I would love to hear from you! I suspect you are a John or a Peggy. If you are a John, would you be interested in participating in a regular group session to continue to develop your data analysis skills? If you are a Peggy, are you interested in furthering your mentoring skills around data analysis?

Reply to this email and let me know!

Workshops

I'm pleased to be able to offer you one of three recent workshops! With each you'll get access to 18 hours of video content, Pat's code, and other materials. Click the buttons below to learn more

In case you missed it…

Two papers have been published based on some of the ideas I developed on the Riffomonas YouTube Channel. The first is a critical review and reanalysis of the paper that originally called rarefaction into question. The second is my approach to testing the impacts of rarefaction and other approaches on microbiome data analysis.

In case you’re looking for a way to cite anything you see on the Riffomonas YouTube channel, remember that I published a description of the channel last year in Microbiology Resource Announcements. I’d love to receive your citation!

Finally, if you would like to support the Riffomonas project financially, please consider becoming a patron through Patreon! There are multiple tiers and fun gifts for each. By no means do I expect people to become patrons, but if you need to be asked, there you go :)

I’ll talk to you more next week!

Pat