Open Source and Community Support
One of the reasons I became a blogger was to become more involved in a community which could offer me advice and support on the problems I face in graduate school and as a woman in STEM. In many cases, others have faced the same types of problems I’m encountering and have found possible solutions. So what does this have to do with open source software? In many cases, there are communities of users that will offer beginners advice and support on starting out with a new software package or help troubleshoot problems. One of the open source software packages I use pretty much daily is LAMMPS (Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator), developed and maintained by a team at Sandia. While it’s a very well-documented code, the error messages can be vague. This is where the support community comes in. The lammps-user mailing list archive is usually my first stop, to…