Stardust | Starbeamrainbowlabs

Happy Christmas / New Year 2023!

Heya!

I hope everyone has been having a restful winter break. This is just a quick post to wish you a happy Christmas and a great new year!

This year has been a very busy one for me - primarily with going part-time and focusing on writing my PhD thesis. I've still done a bunch of cool things this year though. Here are some of my highlights:

Open source work
- Created Share2Fediverse
- Released v1.14: The Multipoint Update for WorldEditAdditions ~~and the subsequent 5 hotfixes~~, which has 11K downloads on ContentDB alone(!)
- Ended an unexpected burnout-induced hiatus on maintainer work for tldr-pages and tackled my GitHub notifications
- Worked in on many other cool things
Researchy-stuff
- A Hull Science Festival Demo
- A paper submission to NLDL-2024!
- Publishing my first journal article
- Started writing my thesis in earnest - 102 A4 single spaced pages so far!

I'll be back in the new year with a bunch of cool things!

Looking ahead

The first event on my list is the Northern Lights Deep Learning Conference 2024, so expect to see coverage of that. Not sure how much time I'll have, but I'll definitely post on my Fediverse(/Mastodon) account: https://fediscience.org/@sbrl and write up later if I don't get a chance at the time.

Speaking of social media, my aforementioned account on the fediverse is my primary account. I post things there that do not make it to Twitter (especially given my automatic reposter has broken since API access has been restricted), so it's worth following me over there.

I will continue making Twitter/X → Fediscience redirect posts on Twitter, but as previously mentioned no Twitter/X API access means reposting content takes not-insignificant effort.

I'm also working with some PhD friends in my research group on SemEval 2024 Task 4. My role on this is identifying which word embedding system to use is best - and since this ties into my currently-partially-written blog post about the research-side of word embeddings, I think I'm ultimately going to wait until I've crunched some numbers for this project before redrafting that post with some fancier visuals.

Looking further ahead, I'm hoping that 2024 will be the year I finally finish my PhD!

Final thoughts

As always, there's likely a lot I've been doing that I have forgotten to blog about here. Please do comment below if there's anything that you'd like to see on here that I haven't posted about / have posted about but it's confusing. I'll do my best to blog about it :D

See you in 2024!

A bauble from a friend's Christmas tree.

Happy Christmas 2021!

Happy Christmas to everyone here! I hope you have a restful break and a great new year :-)

I've got a few things potentially coming up in the new year, from another quick cluster blog post to a post on my new GPU server I bought - and I'm sure I'll accidentally end up writing all sorts of other posts too! I'll also of course be continuing to blog about my PhD experience - which seems to be starting to come together! :D

As always, if you have a thing you're interested in that I'm doing and I haven't yet blogged about (or even something you're confused on in a previous post!), please do let me know in a comment below and I'll do my best to blog about it :-)

A frosted white bauble with green foliage and purple and pink flowers, against a backdrop of a Christmas tree

Happy Christmas 2020!

I hope you had a nice Christmas, and I wish you a more restful and brighter new year.

I'm taking a much needed break at the moment, so the normal regularly scheduled blog posts will resume next week :-)

Things hopefully coming up soon in blog posts include 2 cluster posts (1 about Docker, and another about HTTPS in Fabio), and another post in my NAS series - as I'm now setup with btrfs in raid1 mode, which is working rather well (I'm just in the process of moving everything over at the moment).

A Christmas tree