2 Quickstart for computing

In addition to the standard computer setup provided by office admin (Email, MS Office, etc), M&A members should do the following:

  • Download and install Slack. If you don’t alread have an invite, get one from Noam. Join the #data-sci-discuss and #journal-club channels any others your supervisor suggests or are associated with projects you are assigned to. (Don’t forget #random and #out-of-office-fun!)
  • If you don’t already have one, sign up for an account on GitHub. Provide the Data Librarian with your username so as to add you to the EcoHealth Alliance team. If you already have a GitHub account using a personal email, add your EHA email to your account and set up custom routing to direct EHA organization notifications to your EHA email
  • Install R and then RStudio. Links and instructions can be found here
  • Install git and link it to RStudio and your GitHub account. Instructions for all of this are found here, in Sections 7-15 of Happy Git with R. If you get stuck along the way don’t hesitate to ask for help (via the #data-sci-discuss channel on Slack!).
  • Install Dropbox on your computer with your EHA account (note you can have separate personal and EHA Dropbox folders)
  • Check that your EHA email gives you access to Google Drive. If you prefer it, or your supervisor specifies it, install it locally on your computer

2.1 Optional

In addition, the following programs may be helpful to install (all for Mac users):

  • Homebrew for general package management
  • iTerm2 for a better shell interface. (brew cask install iterm2 or brew install --cask iterm2 using Homebrew in the shell)
  • mosh for connecting to our high-performance servers (brew install mosh using Homebrew in the shell)
  • hub for interacting with GitHub from the shell (brew install hub)