Here are some very interesting suggestions for having a good IT system in your lab (Github, Wiki, website, emails etc.). I’m sure the Mastodon crowd will love these:
https://fraserlab.com/2024/04/22/IT-suggestions-for-new-faculty/
Source: future PI slack, from the #FraserLab
These are good ideas.
Just a warning, though. When you build your lab, you will have a great IT system. It will be elegantly designed, and will be light-years ahead of your PI's structure. And you will wonder how they ever got along without it... until 25 years later, you realize your IT system is now a hodgepodge of duct tape and out-of-date systems that are not nearly as good as the new faculty are designing, and you will realize that updating it would require taking the entire system offline for more than a year and none of your postdocs would accept the new structure...
Of course, that doesn't mean you shouldn't do your best to set things up as carefully as you can when you start. Just a view from down the road. :)
@adredish @elduvelle Please stop talking about my lab infrastructure in public! 🤣
One messy part for me has been: We moved to having all new projects on github. But we still had the old subversion server and repos sitting on a machine we maintained, and a few TB of data sitting around on local servers. Someone would need to triage all of that ... which means a lot of it is still in a now-ignored subversion server. sigh.
Also .. (1/2)
Also, just a reminder that your university email account is owned by your university, so you should have a personal email account for your personal life and try your best to keep the two emails separate.
El Duvelle
Redish Lab
David Andersen