In “Holes”, I noted that one of the holes in my work planning and management is a good tool for tracking and planning upcoming work over time. I have now filled that hole with my Runway Document, which also replaces “The Wall”.
I use Jupyter notebooks extensively for data analysis and exploration. It’s fantastic to be able to quickly see output, including plots, and have it all saved and persisted and viewable on GitHub.
However, when it comes time to prepare for publication, I need to save high-resolution and/or vector versions of the plots for use in LaTeX or Word. The display in Jupyter does not have nearly high enough resolution to copy and paste into a document and have it look acceptably good.
Most of my projects, therefore, have a convenience function for plots that are going into the paper. This function saves the plot to disk (in both PDF and 600dpi PNG formats) and returns it so it can also be displayed in Jupyter. That way I don’t have two copies of the plot code — one for saving and one for interactive exploration — that can get out of sync.
This fall is my third time teaching CS533 (Introduction to Data Science). I co-developed the class with Casey Kennington and taught the first offering in 2017.
This intro is a class I had long wanted to create — when I was on the job market the first time around, it was my answer to ‘what class would you like to create?’ — but I haven’t yet really been able to achieve what I wanted with it. This fall I am taking a step back and rebuilding it. I hope it’s successful.
The syllabus, class materials, etc. are all publicly available.1
This post discusses my design goals and parameters for the class, and its overall structure. I hope to expand on some specific aspects of it in future posts.
Star Trek, when it’s doing its job, has something to say.
TL;DR: Picard has something to say.
Sometimes, that thing begins with an ‘f’, at least when said by one of his co-adventurers.
About a year ago, I switched from technical liners to fountain pens for the bulk of my writing. It started with picking up a Platinum Preppy, and Jennifer giving me a Speedball set for my birthday. I now have quite a few, with different inks and purposes.
Many of them I use largely to write in my notebook; analog productivity rituals are important to me. Most of the ink reports here are on the paper in a Leuchtturm1917 notebook, my primary notebook for both work logging and personal journaling.