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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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I peer pressure many of my friends into using adblockers and other tech stuff that gives them more agency.
Something that I'm especially chuffed with is that a I actually caused a friend to switch to open source software for scientific research. She's doing a psychology PhD was getting frustrated with the online experiment setup on the no-code experiment builder she had been advised to use. The platform didn't allow her to input the experiment parameters she needed and she was complaining to me, and so I had a gander at it, out of curiosity.
I expected there'd be some documentation showing how to use the experiment builder, but there was nothing I could find. Everywhere I looked, there were just more sales pitches. It seems that my friend was only using it because the university had a license for it.
I exclaimed that the lack of documentation and features was ridiculous, given that there's almost certainly an open source equivalent that does more, is free, and almost certainly better documented. I said that flippantly, but then went and researched that. I showed her a few different options and she ended up going for one called PsychoPy.
As one might be able to gather from the name, that's not a no-code experiment builder, but rather one that uses Python. However, for my friend, this was a feature, not a bug; although she didn't already know Python, she was keen to learn — "what's a PhD for if not to learn how to do actual science?".
I found it quite affirming because I don't know if she would have had this thought if not for me. I'm very much a jack of all trades, master of none, due to having many different interests and being spread relatively thin between them. I'm a better programmer than the majority of scientists in my field that I've known, but probably worse than most people who actually write code for their jobs. However, gaining expertise in the more computery (and in some cases, philosophical) side of science makes me feel like I've "diluted" my scientific expertise compared to my peers. It's nice that this problem was one at the intersection of my knowledge areas.