Discussions of neurodiversity at #mozfest Photo by Jennifer Riggins The other weekend I had my first experience of Mozilla Festival, aka #mozfest. It was pretty awesome. I met quite a few people in real life that I’ve previously only known (/stalked) on Twitter, and caught up with others that I haven’t seen for a while. I had the honour of co-facilitating a workshop session on imposter syndrome and how to deal with it with the wonderful Yo Yehudi and Emmy Tsang.
Today1 the office conversation turned to blocking out background noise. (No, the irony is not lost on me.) Like many people I work in a large, open-plan office, and I’m not alone amongst my colleagues in sometimes needing to find a way to boost concentration by blocking out distractions. Not everyone is like this, but I find music does the trick for me. I also find that different types of music are better for different types of work, and I use this to try and manage my energy better.
It barely seems like it, but I’ve been at the British Library now for nearly 6 months. It always takes a long time to adjust and from experience I know it’ll be another year before I feel fully settled, but my team, department and other colleagues have really made me feel welcome and like I belong. One thing that hasn’t got old yet is the occasional thrill of remembering that I work at my national library now.
Photo by me I sit here writing this in the departure lounge at Philadelphia International Airport, waiting for my Aer Lingus flight back after a week at the 13th Research Data Alliance (RDA) Plenary (although I’m actually publishing this a week or so later at home). I’m pretty exhausted, partly because of the jet lag, and partly because it’s been a very full week with so much to take in.
Photo by Sear Greyson on Unsplash I recently attended a workshop, organised by the excellent team of the Turing Way project, on a tool called BinderHub. BinderHub, along with public hosting platform MyBinder, allows you to publish computational notebooks online as “binders” such that they’re not static but fully interactive. It’s able to do this by using a tool called repo2docker to capture the full computational environment and dependencies required to run the notebook.
I’ve found it increasingly difficult to make time to blog, and it’s not so much not having the time — I’m pretty privileged in that regard — but finding the motivation. Thinking about what used to motivate me, one of the big things was writing things that other people wanted to read. Rather than try to guess, I thought I’d ask! Those who know what I'm about, what would you read about, if it was written by me?
Following on from the excitement of having built a functioning keyboard myself, I got a parcel on Monday. Inside was something that I’ve been waiting for since September: an Ultimate Hacking Keyboard! Where the custom-built Laplace is small and quiet for travelling, the UHK is to be my main workhorse in the study at home. Here are my first impressions: Key switches I went with Kailh blue switches from the available options.
I’m typing this post on a keyboard I made myself, and I’m rather excited about it! Why make my own keyboard? I wanted to learn a little bit about practical electronics, and I like to learn by doing I wanted to have the feeling of making something useful with my own hands I actually need a small, keyboard with good-quality switches now that I travel a fair bit for work and this lets me completely customise it to my needs Just because!
“Wenniger aber besser” — Dieter Rams {:.big-quote} I can barely believe it’s a full year since I published my intentions for 2018. A lot has happened since then. Principally: in November I started a new job as Data Services Lead at The British Library. One thing that hasn’t changed is my tendency to try to do too much, so this year I’m going to try and focus on a single intention, a translation of designer Dieter Rams’ famous quote above: Less, but better.
Python is great, but I find it useful to have an alternative language under my belt for occasions when no amount of Pythonic cleverness will make some bit of code run fast enough. One of my main reasons for wanting to learn Rust was to have something better than C for that. Not only does Rust have all sorts of advantages that make it a good choice for code that needs to run fast and correctly, it’s also got a couple of rather nice crates (libraries) that make interfacing with Python a lot nicer.