Dear Reader,

Today, together with my friend Konrad, we’re launching a newsletter about developing quantum software. In this post I want to tell you a bit more about this project. If you don’t want to learn more and just want to subscribe, click here.

Context

First, let me tell you about Konrad.

Konrad is a friend of mine – we’ve been working together since my first quantum job at Bohr in 2018, then Zapata and now at PsiQuantum. So we’ve been working together for ~7 years, with some brief breaks. He’s an absolute beast, I haven’t met anyone1 in my career who came close to the level of proficiency in programming, especially in Python. I have learned soooo much from him over the years and always enjoyed our collaboration.

At some point we decided that it would be nice to share some of the experience we have with other people in the community. It seemed to us that newsletter will be a good form for that:

  • A lot of the things we want to write about are relatively short tips, so newsletter’s short form seems appropriate.
  • We’ve been subscribed to some educational newsletter in the past and it’s a decent format for learning
  • It’s the kind of public committment that will probably force us to do it regularly.

So after waaaay too long period of “We’re busy now, let’s start working on it next week”, we’re finally launching it!

Who is this for?

We want this newsletter to be useful for anyone working with software in the quantum computing space. We’re thinking about two main groups:

  • Researchers – they often have no real training in software engineering, but work with software every day. From our observations, they often require just a little nudge here and there to make their life much easier.
  • Software Engineers – people who are in the same boat as we are! We all work on different projects, but the problems are often very similar, so we hope our perspective might shed some new light at them.

However, software is software. There’s not that many problems that are specific to quantum computing, so it will be most likely widely applicable to anyone working with scientific software in general.

What to expect?

We will be sending you one e-mail per week. Some of the topics that we have already written up or plan to do so are:

  • Testing complex algorithms
  • Pros and cons of using jupyter notebooks
  • Basic debugging techniques
  • Profiling code
  • Managing virtual environments

But we’ll also share some new tools that we just discovered or write about some ad-hoc cases that we have encountered in our daily work.

What’s next?

You can find a landing page & subscription form here!

Also, at IEEE Quantum Week conference we’ll be hosting a tutorial called “10 things ruining code in your research project – do this instead!”, it’ll be on Tuesday, September 2nd. If the premise of the newsletter looks interesting to you, I’m sure this tutorial will also be!

Have a great day!

Michał



Footnotes:

  1. Except our friend Alex, who’s also S-tier. Hi Alex! ↩