Trail - vscode extension for research projects

[diegzumillo]

TL;DR

I made an extension that tracks execution and data generation

Hey there
I started working on this project mainly for my own benefit, because I'm very disorganized. My research is very computationally intensive, whether in physics or AI. So I generate lots of programs and data, and I lose track of it all.
So far I don't know if this is of interest to anyone else, but I wrote about it in my blog. I have a series of weekly projects, where each week I do something different.

Usually I make game related stuff, but this time I made this, which I think might have interested people in this forum.

Blog post about Trail

 

[jedishrfu]

This is an interesting idea. I recently completed a small project for grad studies and didn't worry about naming until I took a break for a few days, came back and couldn't decide which program was my latest version.

At work, this wouldn't have been an issue since I would've checked my code in instead of renaming it.

I was running compression tests on three testfiles over a 10 element range of error bounds values running five programs, my two regression programs and three well known compressors.

I made sure key results were printed and used markdown as my logging format. There's nothing like readable results in one place.

Other measurement data was encoded and output to csv files for analysis and plotting. My code was a layered mix of bash, Python test runner and my c code regression programs.

As I got deeper into the project, runs took longer as more test variations for each program were added and it took on a life of its own.

I did think of automating it even by more storing logs and csv files into date time labeled directories but kept telling myself okay that fix should do it, now one more test run and I’m done. 25 test runs later I got my final test run and my advisor asked about some zip deflation done which I hadn't recorded in my csv files oh well here we go again.