PhD not required: a layperson's guide to reading journal articles

Julia Duimovich



Despite having "learned" how to read a journal article in school, the skill stopped at reading - I didn't really know how to apply what I'd learned to my professional practice. I could read an article on byte code optimization and then go back to work without gaining any practical takeaways. I felt so discouraged because I wasn't really getting anywhere. Once you've read something, you need to be able to use it in some way, or else it becomes trivia. And it takes time to build this skill.

Developing it has huge benefits, however - building your base knowledge of the field, discerning what is bragging and what has technical value, engaging with proposals that are out of your area of expertise, designing experiments, and improving your technical writing.

Specifically, I'll be reviewing a paper on reverse debugging to demonstrate some techniques. You can follow along here if you'd like, although it is not recommended that you read the paper in advance.



The gap between industry & academics is wide and tough to bridge. Not only are journal articles intimidating, they aren't always topical to software engineers. However, there are a ton of benefits to reading journal articles if you know what and how to read them. You'll leave this talk wanting to find yourself a journal article or two, a beverage, and a quiet space so you can learn something new!

A Python conference north of the Golden Gate





North Bay Python is a single-track conference with a carefully curated set of talks representing the diverse Python community and their different areas of interest.



If a topic is less to your interest, or you've met some people you really want to sit down and chat with, we'll have plenty of areas away from the main theatre to catch up and chat.



Our goal is to keep prices as low as possible. That means we won't be catering lunch. Instead, you can look forward to extra-long lunch breaks you can use to explore all of the great food options around the venue.

Produced by NDV:

Sun Nov 3 13:30:00 2019 at Mystic Theatre

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