Today I was fooling around with the lovely Ipython Notebook to get a more streamlined work flow. My old habit when programming in R or Python was to work in the interpreter, and copy useful information into a script as I ran the commands that moved the analysis forward. This works, but it’s not ideal, because when I return to that project after some time I usually don’t remember what was happening. Hence I often end up repeating a bunch of work. Ipython Notebook fixes this, since it encourages the user to document the analysis as they go along. And at the end they have a beautiful report, all ready to be converted to HTML or PDF; this is brilliant for me on the job. Another tool with similar functionality is Rstudio’s markdown features.