Welcome to the Bonham Lab at Tufts Medical Center!
This is a non-exhaustive guide to getting started over the first week or two. Many more details will be included in your first periodic meetings with Kevin.
New member form
New members should start by filling out this form. This will get the ball rolling on everything else.
If you will need an account on the HPC, be sure to check the HPC box so that Kevin can get that paperwork started. (see also High performance computing)
Lab services setup
The lab uses a number of services such as Zulip for chat and Forgejo for code and project tracking. See Lab services onboarding for more details.
You may also want to sign up for a Github account if you don’t already have one.
Bookmark the Coding and version control page and start to familiarize yourself with the lab workflow. Especially if you are new to coding, most of it won’t make sense, learning this stuff is a journey, and it requires lots of practice, so don’t try to memorize it or anything.
Once you have filled out your new user form, Kevin will add you to the lab github organization
Zulip account
The lab uses Zulip to communicate. Zulip is a bit like slack, but uses a threaded conversation model.
Notifications are quite customizable, and you are never expected to respond outside of normal working hours (see Work time protocol > Communication). Please set notifications in a way that works best for you - if Kevin or anyone else sends a message outside of normal business hours, they should not expect a response until the following day. Be assured that Kevin has aggressively curated his notifications 😉.
Project and Trainee Tracking
You should keep track of your goals and progress in a way that Kevin Bonham can participate. See also Keeping a Lab Notebook.
Git repo
Sign up for forgejo first
Before you can do this effectively, you need to complete Lab services onboarding and have a Forgejo account
You will keep track of goals, projects, and weekly meetings in a separate github repo that is updated (via commits and pull-requests) each week. To do this, create a new repository using the trainee template, then follow the instructions in the README to set it up.
If you run into problems, don’t worry! Kevin or another lab member will help you in the first couple of weeks, and you’ll be a pro in no time!
Kevin will add this repo as a Git submodule to the lab wiki obsidian vault, so you can still use Obsidian to edit / interact with your notes if you’d like.
See also Staff Personal Repos
Meetings
You will have periodic (weekly to start) meetings with Kevin, and while the lab remains small, we will have joint lab meetings 3 times/month with Cammie Lesser’s group. See Meetings and other admin for more information.
High performance computing
Are you going to be doing work on the cluster? Check out High performance computing