Fourteen and Counting - People's Favorite Tools

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Thank you to all the people who have sent in short posts about their favourite tools. We are up to fourteen now, and the variety of tools is great to see. Finding out what other people use - and possibly more importantly - why they use it, and for what, is a great shortcut for researchers. There are a bewildering number of research tools around. Getting a tip from someone in your discipline, or from someone who is doing a similar task to you, can really help.

So why not tell us about yours? All it takes is a few short sentences in a form.

So far we have had Paula Martinez on R, with Bianca Peterson enthusiastically seconding, Jeff Oliver sharing his love of Git and GitHub, Kellie Ottoboni talking up IPython, and Thomas Arildsen on how the Jupyter Notebook facilitates his teaching. Juliane Schneider weighed in on the wonders of OpenRefine. Clifton Franklund likes RStudio, while Francesco Montanari is a fan of emacs.

Rayna Harris nominated videoconferencing as her most useful research tool, while Greg Wilson talks up the benefits of asking for help. Robert Sare has posted on the benefits of using rasterio in earth sciences research.

Since then, we have had Richard Vankoningsveld on why he uses a coding sandbox, and Auriel Fournier telling us how she uses Todoist to stay on track. QGIS just got a big tick from Simon Waldman.

Expect more posts as people contribute further favourites. Even if your tool has already been mentioned, we would still welcome a post about it, as your use of the tool may be different.

Have you got a favourite tool you would like to tell us about? Please use this form to add a bit of detail and we will do the rest. You can read the background to these posts here.