This book helps one “get up to speed“ with git. With github being the goto repository-master for most of the R projects out there, it has become imperative for any R programmer to have a decent knowledge of git and the know about ways to interact with github. As of today github has 1.1 million programmers hosting close to 3.2 Million repositories. This has surpassed sourceforge long back. So, an R programmer cannot be ignorant of this distributed version control system.

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I stumbled upon a very interesting write-up that captures the necessary software needed for managing one’s projects. The paper is written by Kieran Healy of Duke University. The takeaways from the paper are as follows : Three principles of work flow : Keep a coherent record of actions. Instead of doing a bit of statistical work and then just keeping the resulting table of results or graphic that you produced, for instance, write down what you did as a documented piece of code.

Via Derman : If You Use a Model, You Are Short Volatility All models are analogies, and being analogies, they are limited in their scope. In physics you can describe ice, water and steam, and the phase transitions between them, with one unified theory, amazingly, and hence you can handle the extremes of freezing and boiling. In finance or economics we have nothing like that. Even beautiful Black-Scholes-Merton ignores volatility variations, illiquidity, panic, government regulations on shorting, to name just a few things that lie outside it.

Stanford professor,John Perry, distills the essence of academic life : The Academic Trough Being a Full Professor has a lot to be said for it. You are a duke or duchess in the medieval institution of the university. You receive a good salary, as big and nice an office as your department has available, first choice of class hours, and a lot of nice other perks. And there is also the wisdom and balanced judgment that comes with age.