Scientific progress relies on incremental improvements, famously described by Newton’s "on the shoulders of giants." While this is true for scientific literature, code-driven analysis has not kept pace. As a scientist who transitioned from fieldwork to modeling land-atmosphere exchange, I've seen how research code often lacks long-term maintenance, limiting reuse. Research teams develop code over short timescales, publish, and move on. This talk proposes a paradigm shift in scientific coding practices, incorporating software engineering for sustainable, collaborative open-source code.
