2019 Blog Changes

Over the coming 1-2 months I plan on modifying the structure of this home page to better reflect my current activities in freelance web development, open science, and neuroscience. Here's a little logo I created using a gift from a friend and fellow volunteer with the OpenWorm project to make this post prettier.

This way I can better express what I would like to do moving forward, rather than hanging on to what I used to do but no longer possessing any of the options and resources to do them.

I would also like to use this as a platform to explore mental health issues, particularly with respect to life in academia.

And here's a little logo I created using a gift from a friend and fellow volunteer with the OpenWorm project to make this post prettier.

Updates

Over the past year or so it had become clear that I was probably never going to return to my previous research in High Performance Computing. I was not willing to apply to just any organization I did not feel confident contributing real value to, and those I had thought I would fit in did not share my belief.

The gulf slowly widened to the point where there was no reasonable path back. As an independent scholar I had no reasonable access to high performance facilities, and limited access to new literature. HPC researchers currently have no active interest in supporting a culture of access to literature through open pre-prints, nor open science publications. I was then forced to recuse myself from peer-reviewing literature from my former field of study. My attempts to retain access by asking my former advisor for an assist, ended up in a silent rejection and hence another dead-end.

My engineering skill-sets carried over from working in the HPC environment were too dispersed for me to feel comfortable applying to mainstream tech companies and organizations. And so over this time period, I have had to slowly re-tool and find a new path I was comfortable with. This has managed to happen through my engagement with the OpenWorm organization. Through patience on the part of that community of scientists, engineers, and enthusiasts; I had found acceptance, appreciation, and a way to structure my time as a regular "work week." From a position of little domain knowledge, I had managed to become comfortable enough with developing in the web and python environments to help produce a database tool for worm movement data (Repo: https://github.com/openworm/movement_cloud.)

So I find myself easing my way out of a very dark chapter of my life, and I'm making some minor changes to this site to reflect this. I have found a new community in Neuroscience and Biology and while I have no formal training in those fields, I consider myself a trained-enough scientist and engineer to make a go at understanding and contributing to these fields. I am removing any references to aspirations of ever returning to my old field of study, and retaining only a historical record of my prior interests. The skill-sets may still come in handy in the future (e.g. building and running tools for some computational neuroscience work,) but attempting to conduct any sort of reasonable research in HPC especially where scaling/scalability is concerned will be a fool's errand on my part.