Recent posts
Why we should review research software
At the recent SciCodes Symposium, I brought up the question of reviewing research software during the panel discussion. One panelist then raised the question of why we should review research software. I found this question surprising at first, but I do agree that it deserves an answer. Here is mine.
Going for robustness: science
This is a follow-up to my earlier post entitled "Going for robustness", focusing on scientific research.
What is "robust science"? I see at least two interpretations, and I am going to discuss both of them: robustness of scientific findings, and robustness of the process of doing science, which includes in particular the robustness of the web of scientific research institutions: first and foremost universities and research labs, but also learned societies, funding agencies, publishers, etc.
Going for robustness
I suspect that most people in the Western world (at least) are realizing that we are living in interesting times. News of floodings, droughts, and wildfires are ever more frequent. We hear that this is due to climate change, which most governments promise to fight, but don't. Our economies keep growing, but our quality of life is not improving. Digital tools are ever more prominent in our lives, but don't make us happy either. The political systems of more and more Western countries are changing, with a clear tendency towards authoritarianism. In daily life, more and more things work less and less well, as products are not available due to problems in a remote country, important but low-status jobs are hard to recruit for, and everyone has to spend more and more time trying to work around the problems caused by all of the above.
Modular malleability
This is a contribution to the Challenge problem: Fearless extensibility by the Malleable Systems Collective.
The low-hanging fruit in computational reproducibility
Yesterday I participated in the International workshop “Software, Pillar of Open Science”, organized by the French Committee for Open Science. In the course of the various presentations and discussions (both in public and during coffee breaks), I realized that something has been absent from such events all the time: the vast majority of scientists.
This blog gets a facelift
Regular visitors to my blog have probably noticed that it looks different now. However, the visual changes are only a side effect of a more profound change: I now use a different static site generator, coleslaw.
Following branching conversations on Mastodon
This post is a follow-up to my previous one, Deconstructing the Mastodon client. My topic is a scenario that traditional Mastodon clients handle rather badly, wheres my home-grown solution handled it very well: lengthy and branching conversations.
Deconstructing the Mastodon client
Ever since I joined Twitter in 2011, and then moved to Mastodon in 2022, I have been unhappy with the timeline view proposed by both of these communication platforms as their main interface. Now I have finally done something about it: I wrote my own Mastodon client. Or perhaps rather a non-client, because the concept of "the client" is a big part of what I disliked.
Welcome to my digital garden!
A few years ago, I discovered Mike Caulfield's The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral and understood why I wasn't happy with my blog.
The dependency hubs in Open Source software
A few days ago, Google announced its experimental project Open Source Insights, which permits the exploration of the dependency graph of Open Source software. My first look at it ended with a disappointment: in its initial stage, the site considers only the package universes of Java, JavaScript, Go, and Rust. That excludes most of the software I know and use, which tends to be written mainly in C, C++, Fortran, and Python. But I do have a package manager that has all the dependency information for most of the software that I care about: Guix. So I set out to do my own exploration of the Guix dependency graph, with a particular focus: identifying the hubs of the Open Source dependency network.
Tags: computational science, computer-aided research, emacs, mmtk, mobile computing, polycrisis, programming, proteins, python, rants, reproducible research, science, scientific computing, scientific software, social networks, software, source code repositories, sustainable software
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