🍟 When the Chips are Down

Welcome to the one hundred and twenty-second issue of Monday Morning Data Science from the Fred Hutch Data Science Laboratory. We are excited to show you what we have been working on (Fresh from the Lab), plus links that we think you would be interested in (Our Weekly Bookmarks Bar). Part of the purpose of this newsletter is to start conversations, so if you have a question or there is something you would like to share with us please let us know by responding directly to this email.

• [New Book: The Psychology of Software Teams] Friend of the lab Cat Hicks’ new book is a research-backed guide to building humane, high-performing engineering organizations, emphasizing the importance of psychological safety, social learning, and cognitive scaffolding. If you care about developer productivity, culture-as-infrastructure, and making innovation a team sport instead of a solo endeavor, this is the book to preorder to hone your tech leadership philosophy.

• [Research Paper: Ten Simple Rules for Teaching Data Science] Friends of the lab Tiffany Timbers and Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel distill years of classroom and workshop experience into ten practical, evidence-informed rules for teaching data science, from scaffolding messy real-world problems to helping learners build confidence with code. If you design curricula, run short courses, or just find yourself informally teaching analyses at the bench this concise guide can help to make those learning experiences more effective.

• [Essay: Why Are Cells Small?] There are surprisingly strict physical constraints that keep most cells tiny, including surface area-to-volume ratios and diffusion times that explain why scaling up is harder than it looks. This essay connects those limits to metabolism and multicellularity, offering an intuitive mental model for why biology solves tissue construction with many small cells instead of a few giant ones.

As always you can contact us by replying directly to this email, or if you work within the Fred Hutch/University of Washington/Seattle Children’s Cancer Consortium you are welcome to join us on the Fred Hutch Data Slack Workspace. For more information about the Fred Hutch Data Science Lab, visit our website: https://hutchdatascience.org/. See you soon!

- The Fred Hutch Data Science Laboratory