Recent happenings

Just grasshopper noise since February, huh? There goes my new year's resolution.

I do have good news, though. Work is going well, I managed to move despite the pandemic, which comes with much more peace and quiet, my master's thesis is coming along nicely, university work is stabilizing and I intend to write a series of posts on applying Bayesian inference to stellarator data, which is nice.

I've also started reading the docs for scipy, because I realized a problem that seems to exist everywhere. Everyone's replicating their functionality. People you consider great programmers will still be spending their valuable time personally implementing functionality that would have been handled with a simple from scipy import thing in a much more bug-free, verified and universal way, simply because scipy is so large that few people are actually aware of their full functionality.

I don't mean to rip on scipy in any way, here, but I'm just stating an issue that I don't see people addressing - more educational work is needed.

I found the pdf for the current version's docs, put it on my Kindle, managed to run it (poor old thing is choking under the weight of all those pretty plots), and... had to skip ~250 pages of release notes.

Also, Nick Murphy of PlasmaPy fame recommended Clean Code to me and it turns out to be a neat book.

And... that's about all I have for now. Coming next, and soon: a return to our more regularly scheduled, technical programming!