Importance of Programming Skills for Research

After I have done several long-time measurments of 2D particle size distributions by hand I got sick of sitting in front of the device and adjust its parameters for every single measurement all by myself. Therefore, I have written a program which does this for me and saves me a lot of time. While my measurement is running I have time to write this blog entry or evaluate data of previous measured data, also the overall time for the measurements is reduced about 50%. It is not only data generation that can be done by a computer, but the correction of data, too. One important advantage of automized measurements or data correction is that you can be sure it is done the same way every time only depending on your code.

But this was only achievable because of programming lectures during my studies to get my skills on a professional level. As this skills are worthwhile I can encourage everyone to invest time to learn programming.