Saaientist20

This is a reboot of the saaientist blog that I kept many years ago. As I said then: "It started out long ago as a personal notebook to help me remind how to do things, but evolved to cover more opinionated posts as well." That blog was very useful, as it helped me to organise my thoughts, served as my personal labjournal/notebook, and helped me to come in contact with many interesting people.

When I started my tenure track in 2010, the kind of work I did shifted from coding to writing grants and reports, and being a professor puts more pressure on actually making sense when voicing my opinions. Now having moved to UHasselt and putting my shoulders under the new Data Science Institute, this seems even more true.

However, it now actually might be more necessary than before. As I do code once in a while but not frequently, I end up googling the same things over and over again. As I try to organise the practical parts of my "big data" course (setting up docker images, jupyter notebooks, …​), I end up researching the same technical topics each year. As I try to make quick visualisations, I notice that these are not as quick as they used to be.

So I resurrect the saaientist blog. Everything posted here is bound to be full of errors (if about coding) and not well thought-through (if about anything opinion-like). Welcome to you and, frankly, myself again.