  Reproducibility is an ideal that no researcher would dispute "in the
abstract", but when aspirations meet the cold hard reality of the academic
grind, reproducibility often "loses out". In this essay, I share some personal
experiences grappling with how to operationalize reproducibility while
balancing its demands against other priorities. My research group has had some
success building a "culture of reproducibility" over the past few years, which
I attempt to distill into lessons learned and actionable advice, organized
around answering three questions: why, what, and how. I believe that
reproducibility efforts should yield easy-to-use, well-packaged, and
self-contained software artifacts that allow others to reproduce and generalize
research findings. At the core, my approach centers on self interest: I argue
that the primary beneficiaries of reproducibility efforts are, in fact, those
making the investments. I believe that (unashamedly) appealing to self
interest, augmented with expectations of reciprocity, increases the chances of
success. Building from repeatability, social processes and standardized tools
comprise the two important additional ingredients that help achieve
aspirational ideals. The dogfood principle nicely ties these ideas together.
