Well, December’s here at last, and with it Day 1 of Advent of Code. … It goes on to explain that you may only leave by solving a captcha to prove you’re not a human. Apparently, you only get one millisecond to solve the captcha: too fast for a normal human, but it feels like hours to you. … As well as posting solutions here when I can, I’ll be putting them all on https://github.
It’s a common lament of mine that I don’t get to write a lot of code in my day-to-day job. I like the feeling of making something from nothing, and I often look for excuses to write bits of code, both at work and outside it. Advent of Code is a daily series of programming challenges for the month of December, and is about to start its third annual incarnation. I discovered it too late to take part in any serious way last year, but I’m going to give it a try this year.
!!! intro "" Monday 20 and Tuesday 21 November 2017 I’m at the Research Data Management Forum in Manchester. I thought I’d use this as an opportunity to try liveblogging, so during the event some notes should appear in the box below (you may have to manually refresh your browser tab periodically to get the latest version). I've not done this before, so if the blog stops updating then it's probably because I've stopped updating it to focus on the conference instead!
I thought it was about time I had some sort of content policy on here so this is a first draft. It will eventually wind up as a separate page. Feedback welcome! !!! aside “Content policy” This blog’s primary purpose is as a reflective learning tool for my own development; my aim in writing any given post is mainly to expose and develop my own thinking on a topic. My reasons for making a public blog rather than a private journal are:
!!! intro "" This is a post that I’ve been writing for months, and writing in my head for years. For some it will explain aspects of my personality that you might have wondered about. For some it will just be another person banging on self-indulgently about so-called “mental health issues”. Hopefully, for some it will demystify some stuff and show that you’re not alone and things do get better.
What is a librarian? Is it someone who has a masters degree in librarianship and information science? Is it someone who looks after information for other people? Is it simply someone who works in a library? I’ve been grappling with this question a lot lately because I’ve worked in academic libraries for about 3 years now and I never really thought that’s something that might happen. People keep referring to me as “a librarian” but there’s some imposter feelings here because all the librarians around me have much more experience, have skills in areas like cataloguing and collection management and, generally, have a librarian masters degree.
Kanban board Jeff Lasovski (via Wikimedia Commons) I’ve been working with our IT services at work quite closely for the last year as product owner for our new research data portal, ORDA. That’s been a fascinating process for me as I’ve been able to see first-hand some of the agile techniques that I’ve been reading about from time-to-time on the web over the last few years. They’re in the process of adopting a specific set of practices going under the name “Scrum”, which is fun because it uses some novel terminology that sounds pretty weird to non-IT folks, like “scrum master”, “sprint” and “product backlog”.
Photo by Lena Bell on Unsplash Every year, the Mozilla Foundation runs a two-day Global Sprint, giving people around the world 50 hours to work on projects supporting and promoting open culture and tech. Though much of the work during the sprint is, of course, technical software development work, there are always tasks suited to a wide range of different skill sets and experience levels. The participants include writers, designers, teachers, information professionals and many others.
A couple of months ago, I went to Oxford for an intensive, 2-day course run by Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry for prospective new instructors. I’ve now had confirmation that I’ve completed the checkout procedure so it’s official: I’m now a certified Data Carpentry instructor! As far as I’m aware, the certification process is now combined, so I’m also approved to teach Software Carpentry material too. And of course there’s Library Carpentry too…
For most of the last few years I've been lucky enough to attend the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC). One of the main audiences attending is people who, like me, work on research data management at universities around the world and it's begun to feel like a sort of "home" conference to me. This year, IDCC was held at the Royal College of Surgeons in the beautiful city of Edinburgh.