After I started my job at Cardiff University as a full-time Research Assistant, my primary work was on developing online experiments to study decision-making. As part of my job, I used a lot of front-end tools, specifically a JavaScript framework for designing online experiments, namely jsPsych. While working with that tool I decided that there was something lacking in this open-access framework. The missing piece, for me, was that there was no way to test whether your online experiment was working apart from a) going through it manually, which is painstakingly slow and boring or 2) writing up experiment-specific code to test various parts, which is hard to generalise and also time-demanding.

To resolve this, I expanded the jsPsych framework to incorporate a ‘simulation’ mode, which I shared on GitHub. The creators of the plugin picked up my idea and incorporated it into the framework.

This work ultimately lead the original creators of the plugin to write a paper and invited me to collaborate on the final product. The paper was ultimately published in Behaviour Research Methods.