So here we are, launching yet another data science blog into a field that already has blogs devoted to telling you about the 51 other blogs you NEED to check out. We understand if right now you're wondering, or perhaps screaming aloud, “Why?”

Here's the answer: we spend our working lives neck-deep in Dependency Map data. As a result, we make lots of observations: about what works and what doesn't, about what analyses can be relied on and which ones are misleading, about the usefulness (or lack thereof) of various computational biology innovations, about holes and artifacts and all the messiness that comes with biological data. Most of these are stand-alone observations: they don't lend themselves to being made into the kind of story that we all expect in a publication. But in many cases we think these observations have value for a wider audience, sometimes just to understand why we made a decision and sometimes because they might inform how other users look at the data.

We're planning to use this space to communicate in a simple language what we've noticed about the data and how we recommend you think about and approach it. Some posts will have fairly broad applicability, closer to what you might expect from a traditional data science blog. Others will be narrowly focused on why we made a particular decision for DepMap.

We're excited to begin sharing what we've learned and to hear back from you what you think about our observations and choices. We hope this blog will be the start of richer conversations between and among CDS and the broader research community.