Scientific Software Developer Mantra

"Care enough to be a better scientific software developer today than yesterday."


For several months now, I have been trying to word a personal mantra for a scientific software developer (SSD). There has been about half a dozen mantras that I have been tossing around without settling on anyone mantra. They all were similar and the basic idea started with was, "Get better each day." Which in life is a good mantra.

So I decided to settle on the one above and to use it until a more polished one emerges (refactoring for emergent design.) It may seem too wordy for a mantra but it conveys how I want to behave as a SSD. Of course, if I was doing other parts of computational physics then computational physicist could be inserted easily.

Recently, Dan Pink posted a video called "Two Questions" about two questions that could change your life in 2010. I thought question #2 was coincidentally appropriate for this post.