Apropos of software engineering for scientists, I had the opportunity to be a reviewer for C. Titus Brown‘s JOSS publication of sourmash, is a pretty cool Python library around some very fast C code for computing (and comparing) MinHash sketches on (gene) sequences.
My critique of sourmash is marked “minor revisions only” because the core functionality is so useful and usefully abstracted (while staying close to the usual formats in genetics). There are lots of nice things about the way Titus has packaged it, and I threw a few more suggestions into the github issue tracker. I enjoyed getting to look through this package, and I want to promote sourmash as a model for how scientific packages should be shared within and across labs, at least in Python.
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