At least, this is what the first page of my brand new notebook states! No, I’m not judging my own research here, the notebook was just a giveaway from the German Stem Cell Network conference last week in Frankfurt and in some way inspired me to start keeping notes related to my work, ideas and projects. The beautiful cover shows some Petri dishes with names of dyes, from which I only heard GFP before - not a shame for a computational biologist, who spends most of the time in front of a white screen with black letters on it. But Hold on! Sometimes its even a black screen with colored letters on it - indicating a source code and a (hopefully) productive time!

Going back to the title, the question What IS good science? popped into my mind and I remembered a great paper by Greg Wilson on best practises for scientific computing. In case you’re just starting with computational biology or bioinformatics or never heard about how to write what is considered good software, just jave a look at the paper and stay tuned!

Greg Wilson, D.A. Aruliah, C. Titus Brown, Neil P. Chue Hong, Matt Davis, Richard T. Guy, Steven H.D. Haddock, Kathryn D. Huff, Ian M. Mitchell, Mark D. Plumbley, Ben Waugh, Ethan P. White and Paul Wilson. Best Practices for Scientific Computing. PLOS Biology (2014), doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001745