Reinventing the wheel - how often does it happen in research?

You are learning about what real research is like.

Seriously, people *are* interested in the gory details. Some of the things that people are interested in are:

1) why did you use this particular package or process data in this particular way. What were some of the alternatives and why did you not use them.

2) how did you like that package?

3) was there anything that you discovered or produced that would make life easier for other people doing similar things. (i.e. we spend five weeks doing this, but then we found out that you could do things this easier way) We wrote these scripts, and we posted them onto the web, or we wrote these scripts, it turns out that they are unreusable because .....

Getting out useful plots is a #@$#@$ pain in the rear end, and if you figured out a way of doing it more quickly (or can explain why it can't be done quickly) then that's research.

wouldn't you be proud of being the person who invented the wheel? If you can re discover something good you are in very good company and can expect more rewarding results in future.

They really should. I got the idea to do X from person Y, but I was the person that actually sat down in front of the computer and did it. There's a big difference between getting the idea to climb Everest and actually planting the flag.

Oh okay, those are good points. I should talk about those then. There were other approaches I tried that didn't quite work out, and I should discuss those (which also means that I don't have to totally throw out several weeks of work, which is somewhat reassuring)

Hm, well, it was just taking equations I could find on the Internet and then recoding them to be usable in Python's Matplotlib. So it wasn't like rediscovering how to project things onto a 2D stereographic projection.

Ah okay. Let's see here - what if what I did didn't produce results yet? The LSST isn't going to do anything for several more years, so the only thing I can say is that I coded a way to project stars on the grid in a different interface.