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. Read more...

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. Read more...

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? Read more...

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. Read more...

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! Read more...

“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. Read more...

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. Read more...

Photo by Andrew Hughes on Unsplash I’ve chosen not to make any specific resolutions this year; I’ve found that they just don’t work for me. Like many people, all I get is a sense of guilt when I inevitably fail to live up to the expectations I set myself at the start of the year. However, I have set a couple of what I’m referring to as “themes” for the year: touchstones that I’ll aim to refer to when setting priorities or just feeling a bit overwhelmed or lacking in direction. Read more...

!!! tldr “TL;DR” I’ve made Saga, a thing for compiling documents by combining code and data with templates. What is it? Saga is a very simple command-line tool that reads in one or more data files, runs one or more scripts, then passes the results into a template to produce a final output document. It enables you to maintain a clean separation between data, logic and presentation and produce data-based documents that can easily be updated. Read more...

When you’re writing analysis code, Python (or R, or JavaScript, or …) is usually the right choice. These high-level languages are set up to make you as productive as possible, and common tasks like array manipulation have been well optimised. However, sometimes you just can’t get enough speed and need to turn to a lower-level compiled language. Often that will be C, C++ or Fortran, but I thought I’d do a short post on why I think you should consider Rust. Read more...