Just over 12 years ago, on January 9th 2012, the first WaterProgramming post was published. It was written by Joe Kasprzyk who is now an Associate Professor at CU Boulder, but at the time was a graduate student in the Reed Research Group. The post reads, in it’s entirety:
Welcome!
“This blog shares tips for writing programs and running jobs associated with using multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) for water resources engineering. It will be informal, with posts on a number of topics by a number of folks.“
Since that first post, there have been 538 posts on the WaterProgramming blog!
Since that time, the content and style of posts has naturally evolved alongside the groups research foci and training needs. As we transition into a new year, I wanted to take the opportunity to look back and study the 12 years of activity on the WaterProgramming blog.
In preparing for this post, I have downloaded the entirety of the WaterProgramming blog archive and performed some fun analysis to look more closely at what has been made over the years.
To those of you who are regular readers of the blog, thank you for the continued interest! To those who may be less familiar, I hope this post helps to give you a bigger-picture of what goes on in this niche corner of the internet.
New tools to support the blog, and our top posts of all time
Before going any further, I want to point out a few new tools we have developed to support the blog content and anyone who is interested in our training activities. Given the number of posts on this site, it may be difficult to navigate the different posts and topics.
To make learning with the blog easier, we created the Reed Group Lab Manual (which was highlighted in Andrew’s blog post last fall) that includes:
- A Training section which will direct you to relevant posts when getting started with a new topic.
- A WaterProgramming Blog Post Catalog which includes a searchable table for exploring the post archive.
Now, to kick us off, I want to highlight our five most-popular blog posts to-date. The top five posts of all time, based on total views are:
- PyCharm as a Python IDE for Generating UML Diagrams by Tom Wild
- Converting Latex to MS Word docx (almost perfectly) by Bernardo Trindade
- A quick example code to write data to a csv file in C++ by David Gold
- Types of Errors in Numerical Methods by Rohini Gupta
- Running a Python script using Excel macros by Lillian Lau
Post length over time
Perhaps one of the most obvious changes which has taken place over the last 12 years is the change in average blog post length. The figure below shows the length of each individual post (blue) with the annual average post length overlaid (yellow).
At the start of it’s life, WaterProgramming posts could be characterized as bite-sized tips-and-tricks which were often 200-500 words in length. In the first year along, there were more than 80 WaterProgramming posts!
In more recent years, the style of post has evolved to be quite a bit longer often coming in at 500-1500 words. Consequently, the posting frequency has been reduced (see figure below) and we have stabilized to an average of ~40 posts per year (with there being 35 posts in 2023).
Our most common topics
While the original Welcome! post emphasized our focus on “writing programs and running jobs associated with using multiobjective evolutionary algorithms” there has been a large variety of different posts since then.
Here, I took a look at all of the blog post titles over the years, and have identified the most frequent words (see figure below).
Looking at this plot, one thing stands out very clearly: we like working with Python! The most-frequent words reflect the “WaterProgramming” title and are: Python, Data, Analysis, Borg, Code.
However, I also want to highlight the frequency with which our posts provide some sort of demonstration and/or training activity which is a focus for our group. This focus on reproducibility and open-science is shown by the fact that some of the other most-frequent title words include:
- Training
- Interactive
- Example
Another theme revealed here is that we aim to keep the content accessible across audiences, with titles frequently including the words “introduction”, “basic”, and “simple”.
And lastly, I will employ a highly sophisticated (/s) data visualization technique to help illustrate the key WaterProgramming themes in a more appealing way: the word cloud.
Conclusion and Thank You
As I was getting established in the Reed Research Group, I personally found the WaterProgramming blog to be a priceless resource. Now, I am very glad to able to contribute to this site, be part of the community, and support others in their learning.
I want to close out with a big THANK YOU to all of the contributors over the years. You all rock. In the table below I want to acknowledge anyone and everyone who has contributed to this blog in this past, along with a link to their top blog post. The majority of these folks have moved on from the Reed Group (or were external contributors) who are off doing great work; the table below does not include their impressive titles or accolades.
In no particular order:
Water Programming: A Collaborative Research Blog 