Joining Mastodon in 2017 turned out to be a positive change for me. Twitter had been making me depressed and anxious, and I needed a way out. At that point Mastodon – an open source social network – was unfamiliar to me and seemed rough around the edges. But the people I found there were… Continue reading Further into Mastodon
Open Journal Matcher is here
I’m very pleased to let you know about a project I’m releasing today, the Open Journal Matcher. It’s a resource for people looking to find a suitable journal for their work. Paste in a draft abstract and see the best matching open access journals! Open Journal Matcher uses a natural language processing library called spaCy… Continue reading Open Journal Matcher is here
Backing away from GCP
I finally got a working prototype of my journal recommender project up and running; I just shared it with a few co-workers yesterday. However, it has been a bit of a journey to get here: I was only able to get the project finished by backing away from Google Cloud Platform. I won’t dwell on… Continue reading Backing away from GCP
Some things are harder remotely
I know there has been a lot of talk about how people will continue to work from home, even after the virus fades. This seems mostly sensible. I find I can do most of my job from home quite well, thank you. Of course teaching and reference are more difficult remotely, but the rest is… Continue reading Some things are harder remotely
Beginning again
The past few months have been humbling for me, programming-wise. I’ve struggled a lot with Google Cloud Platform, without much success. It’s been frustrating. It has also forced me to re-evaluate my progress as a programmer. The real issue has been that I failed at being a self-reliant problem solver. It’s one of the hallmarks… Continue reading Beginning again
Puzzles
Sometimes, it’s important to enjoy coding for it’s own sake. It can be fun to solve problems and bend your brain a bit. Work doesn’t always offer this. Sometimes work is, well, work. That’s why this weekend I’ve been spending time with checkio. Checkio is a programming puzzle site, where the only goal is to… Continue reading Puzzles
The (much needed) back burner
Some technology projects really test my patience and stamina. Either they’re too advanced for me, or they use badly-documented technology that’s hard to work with. There is sometimes an upside to this frustration: it’s good for me to try things that are difficult or at the limits of my skill set. But it’s also nice… Continue reading The (much needed) back burner
There be dragons…
For a beginner trying to solve a programming problem, there is a lot of readily Googleable help. You can usually solve your problem with very clear, specific, and accessible instructions. Things are different a bit further down the programming path. As the problems become harder, the solutions become less obvious. For example, I now might… Continue reading There be dragons…
Preliminary thoughts on Google Cloud Platform
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was granted a bunch of Google Cloud Platform credits. I’ve started using them, and here are my initial thoughts: There is a Cloud Platform service for most of the use cases I can imagine for my project. This means that there are a lot of options to… Continue reading Preliminary thoughts on Google Cloud Platform
Async
I started working with Python around version 3.3, which predates the addition of asynchronous features into the language’s standard library. Asynchronous programming in Python has come a long way since then; it is now a well-established feature of the language. I first wrestled with async on an Amtrak train, on my way home from the… Continue reading Async
