I recently found out that I got funding from Google for my journal recommender project. More than I expected, too. I had hoped to receive maybe $200 or $300 of Google Cloud Platform credits, but they gave me $5000 in credits, which was quite a surprise. This is good news for this project, because it… Continue reading Unexpected funds
Further into hardware
I used to really dislike computer hardware. It seemed like it always cropped up as an inconvenience or annoyance when I was trying to do something with code. I preferred the abstractions and ephemeralness of software to the inconvenience of physical things. More recently, my thoughts on this have been changing. In part, I’m realizing… Continue reading Further into hardware
Hacker hours
Recently, I have been occasionally guest-hosting Hacker Hours at the Brooklyn Public Library on Sunday afternoons. It’s an event where people get together to work on programming projects, and help each other out by sharing skills and knowledge. It draws some seasoned programmers, as well as people who are entirely new to coding. The informal… Continue reading Hacker hours
Feast or famine
Quite recently, I was feeling disappointed that I didn’t have any library coding projects to work on. I felt I was failing at my goal of bringing more code into my academic librarianship. But things change quickly. I’m not sure what happened, but over the course of last week, five(!) new programming projects landed on… Continue reading Feast or famine
Sentiment analysis
For almost five years now, our library has been archiving tweets about our college. I’ve posted about that here and here. Until recently, I didn’t really have an agenda for this data, other than preserving it. Last week that changed. At our college’s Data Faculty Interest Group, I mentioned the tweet archive as a potentially… Continue reading Sentiment analysis
Recommending journals programmatically
I had been keeping this project under my hat, but I’ve proposed it as a conference talk now, so maybe it’s time to share. I’ve been building a journal recommender tool. It’s aimed at faculty, and is built on data from the Directory of Open Access Journals. The idea is that a faculty member could… Continue reading Recommending journals programmatically
The modern web
I’ve been learning some JavaScript recently. Mostly this is so that I can better understand modern JS frameworks. I have some catching up to do: it has been a while since I looked at JavaScript. Anyhow, my main takeaway from learning (a very small amount) about React and Vue.js is that the DOM isn’t what… Continue reading The modern web
On podcasts
I spend more time than I’d like to on the New York City subway. It’s mostly boring, punctuated by occasional dramatic failures, where getting to your destination seems almost impossible. In any case, I find that my time on the subway needs to be put to use with some productive activity, or I would totally… Continue reading On podcasts
On testing code
Unit testing seems like a very sensible thing to do. Having tests that ensure that your code is doing what you expect is an obviously good idea. I’m a very cautious person by nature, so testing appeals to me very strongly. Nonetheless I’ve been slow to add it to my workflow. In part this is… Continue reading On testing code
Pi-hole
I’ve had a Raspberry Pi sitting around my office for quite a while. I bought it in a brief moment of enthusiasm for hardware that quickly faded, so it has mostly sat around in the box unused. I think the main reason I neglected it is because I hadn’t come up with a compelling use… Continue reading Pi-hole
