Workflow

In April 2025, I opened a very short issue in my PyLossless fork: there should be some sort of metric out there that we can add to the test suite to show the data is “cleaner” after pipeline runs Seemed reasonable and I figured that there would be a publication or something out there answering this. This came up because I was rounding out a test suite. I wanted something that could tell me if the data was “better” in a meaningful way, because I already had one making sure the input was different than the output. ...

In March 2025, I had an idea for improving quality control in PyLossless. I wanted to bring back being able to review an EEG recording to select independent components, choose a time window, and immediately compare the raw signal against the result of removing those components. It had been done in the previous version in MATLAB, but I was less familiar with the inner working of PyLossless at the time. I was also a complete novice when it came to things like Qt 5, PyQt, and the mne-qt-browser. ...

I recently gave a SHARCNET General Interest Webinar called “Writing More Code with AI Agents.” More than 300 people registered. Attendance was excellent, there were lots of questions, and I’ve had a decent number of follow-up conversations over email. Pretty happy with how it turned out! The response also confirmed why I wanted to give the talk. People are constantly asking me agents and what they should be doing with them. They’re watching other researchers and developers move very quickly with these tools, and there’s a real fear of missing out. They want to try them, but they don’t necessarily know where to start or how much of the output they should trust. ...

A MATLAB analysis pipeline can be battle-tested and still be difficult to share. The code can work, but the next platform may have the wrong MATLAB version, missing dependencies, or no MATLAB installation at all. I put together a small MATLAB container template to show that you don’t necessarily need to rewrite the analysis to solve this. MATLAB supports compiling a standalone application and packaging it as a Docker image. The deployed application runs with MATLAB Runtime rather than a full MATLAB installation. ...

Starting an EEG study means making dozens of small decisions. Where will the original recordings live? How will they become a BIDS dataset? Which software environment will the study use? Where does preprocessing end and analysis begin? A student has to answer these questions before they’ve had enough experience to know what the consequences will be. Their supervisor then has to review those answers, remember what everyone decided, and figure out whether the project can still be reproduced two years later. ...