I recently pushed five old research projects to GitHub, modernized and documented. It felt like reopening time capsules.

Dusting off the archives

Over the past weeks, I have been revisiting code from across my academic career and preparing it for public release. The projects span over a decade of work: SCIAN_LEO_CPM and SCIAN_EVL_SpherSIM from my time at SCIAN-Lab working on biophysics simulations, CEFOP_DinHot from the optical tweezers work at CEFOP around 2010, a Dual Photography implementation, and the Robotic Writer – my earliest significant project, a robotic arm controller from my undergraduate days at UdeC back in 2004.

Each of these sat in private folders for years, some in formats that were becoming increasingly difficult to run. Modernizing them meant updating dependencies, adding documentation, and in several cases building simple web interfaces so that anyone can interact with the core ideas without wrestling with outdated toolchains.

Why bother?

Scientific code has a short shelf life. Papers get published, and the code that produced the results quietly rots on a forgotten hard drive. I think that is a loss – not just for reproducibility, but because these projects represent real ideas and real effort that deserve to be accessible.

There is also something deeply satisfying about seeing a simulation from 2004 running again in a modern browser. The robotic arm controller, the optical tweezer dynamics, the cellular automata – they all still work, and they all still teach something.

Making this code open is a small act, but it matters. If even one student finds these projects useful or interesting, the effort will have been worth it.