Weeknotes: 6th January 2025
/me taps microphone
"Is this thing on?"
Last week
It was the festive period, and for once I mostly spent it away from the computer.
Webplats
I did a little hacking on Webplats, my OCaml project for publishing my websites, but that was about it. My aim is to refactor it so I can use it for multiple websites, rather than it being hard coded for just one at the moment.
Oxcaml
Last year was the year I got into using OCaml enough that it has started to feel like my default language. There's still gaps where I find it easier to use other tools, but it's getting there. But OCaml isn't sitting still, and Anil has been getting excited about "Oxcaml", which is an attempt to add some Rust like behaviour where you can tell the language more about the expected life cycle of memory allocations to let it be more performant in critical sections.
Anil pointed me at this series of videos and this series of blog posts which I've been watching/reading.
Whilst I think this sort of thing makes the language messier (adding yet more syntax to be explicty about memory lifetimes), it is optional, so you only need to do it for critical code. I do think it'd be super useful for something like my retro-graphics library Claudius.
This week
Planning
It's an arbitrary date, but coming back from the new year is a good time to review work last year, and try plan out things for the next year, so I intend to put some effort into that, and try catch up with my regular collaborators and see what their plans are and how I can align with that.
Last year was a bit of a slog at times as I tried to combine too many in flight research items: using our experimental new build system, shark, to run and manage new experimental code for ecology projects was a bit much for instance. I'm reminded of a quote from a friend many years ago, who described someone he knew as struggling because they were "innovating on too many fronts", and I think that nicely sums up the problems I was hitting. This year I need to be more cognisant of what the research part of any given task is, and then try ensure the other bits around that are standard. I sit at the intersection of two fields, computer science and ecology, and so that makes it easy to try do both at once, but I think in 2025 I need to avoid that where I can.
Weeknotes
Chatting with Anil, we talked yet again about wanting to do weeknotes. I've done that for various parts of my life in the past and I find it a useful tool. I did for the first year or so when I joined the University again on the team's Notion site, but when that went away I didn't bother continuing it. But I miss that, so I want to put something in place to let me start again.
LIFE
The LIFE paper, which looks at the impact on extinction rates of endangered species due to land-usage changes, will be published on the 9th.