Posts about status
A pandemic story, or, what I learned working with nuclear fusion
As promised, here's a post on the story of my time at IPPLM - the Institute of Plasma Physics and Laser Microfusion, where I worked for the last almost-three-years. Past tense, because since September I've successfully found remote work as a Python software developer at a large pharmaceutical company. Speaking of... I don't think I can say as much as I'd hoped about the projects we're working on, but, suffice to say, I think they have some real potential for helping people with neurodegenerative diseases. So I'm still trying to tackle one of the Large Problems, just... another one, and more so from a backend/support angle.
While writing this, I realized that this story was also deeply intertwined with the story of the global COVID-19 pandemic, because that turned the whole situation on its head. I thought about separating the two, but decided instead to embrace it and tell it whole rather than in pieces. So, beware, this is going to get long. To alleviate that, I've broken it up more than usual and have placed the major takeaways in specifically formatted sections throughout.
With that disclaimer in place... onto the story!
Mid-2022 Update
I thought I'd give a quick update on some recent happenings.
Firstly, and most importantly, and I'm still a little shocked that this actually happened - we got married! :)
With that, and since there's nothing more beautiful in life than symmetry, we've decided to both take a combo surname. Thus, the About page has had a minor text update :)
Sława Ukrainie!
There's very little to be said about this, but it needs to be said nonetheless.
The importance of good notation
I've just spent the last four weeks hunting for a bug in my thesis code that I've mentioned last time. Since then, I've given up on the paper I'm reimplementing more times than I can count. Well... Can you guess how that went?
I aten't dead
Here's a quick status update; I have been meaning to post these more often.
Now with comments through utteranc.es!
As promised, I've switched the site's comment system from Disqus to utteranc.es. It ended up being pretty simple to do in Nikola. If I'm correct about how this is supposed to work, comments on the site will now appear as issues on the site's repo. Of course, I would love to test out how this works :)
The plan for 2021
And good riddance to 2020!
Anger, disinformation, populism, the sorry state of the world right now... and truth
This post should be seen through the lens of self therapeutic writing, as I angrily work through a few ideas on my mind.
And now, for something completely different.
Short updates: Bayes, Master's, PlasmaPy, Protoss, Julia
No real new material today, as I'm still in the thick of it. A few updates:
First JOSS review!
Several months ago, I stumbled upon the journal they call Joss. Well, actually, JOSS - the Journal of Open Source Software, "a developer friendly, open access journal for research software packages". It's a completely free, open-source and open-access alternative to established, for-(often-a-lot-of)-profit journals such as those by Reed-Elsevier or Springer.
And a few days ago, I've been called into service to review VlaPy, "1D-1V Vlasov-Poisson(-Fokker-Planck) Plasma Physics Simulation Tool". While I'm digging into that code, I thought I'd write something up about JOSS in general!