Why software engineering processes and tools don’t work for machine learning
I&#x27;ve seen a lot of the software engineers on teams I&#x27;ve worked with complain about the way data science and machine learning professionals work with code, and They. Just. Don&#x27;t. Get. It. Stop trying to push the tools and processes that you developed for yourselves onto us!<p>People I work with don&#x27;t care that our notebook tools have rudimentary syntax highlighting or type-checking. We don&#x27;t rely on our tools to make sure our code is written correctly. We just memorize the APIs and rely on experimentation to get things working.<p>Please don&#x27;t make us use git. Checking out and checking in files is too slow! Oftentimes, Slacking code to a colleague is the best way to collaborate, and the fastest.<p>Don&#x27;t make us use confusing and broken authentication schemes to access our data! I work best if I can just download live data to my machine and work locally. If it&#x27;s too big or it&#x27;s something like streaming, just give me an admin password that I can save in my notebook and use to hit some database clusters. Nothing wrong with that!