Happy new year 2025! o/

Heya there!

This is just a short post to say hi, and happy new year! I hope everyone had a great christmas / winter break.

As I battle a bit of burnout from doing rather too much teaching related tasks in a short space of time (hoping to do a detailed post on my teaching experiences soon), I have actually achieved a lot this past year despite this:

Submitted my thesis and had my viva
Completed designed and delivered an entire 20 credit module on Linux + sysadmin from scratch in the span of ~4 months
Presented at a conference - NLDL-2024 - for the first time - to a room of 250 people O.o
Much open source work spread across many repositories

Looking ahead

Looking ahead, a significant portion of my energy is going to be spent on getting my corrections done for my PhD. It is requiring the re-running of a bunch of experiments with a grab-bag of new features being added to the codebases, which if you have been following the commit history have been arriving slowly.

I'll hopefully be at a good enough point soon-ish to write another PhD update blog post about this.

Last year, I said that I hoped 2024 would be the year I finally finish my PhD. It was..... kinda sorta maybe okay-not-really. This time I really do want 2025 to be the year I finally finish this PhD....... I'm ready to just be done with the stupid thing now.

In 2025 I want to dedicate more time to blogging here. 2024 has not been a great year for this blog, so I want to try and change that this year. I have had lots of ideas for blog posts..... I just haven't had the energy to write them. Hopefully this will mean lots of cool new blog posts about things I've learnt and found!

If you're interested in keeping up to date with what I've been up to, I can recommend following me on the fediverse (@sbrl@fediscience.org). I post smaller stuff there that either isn't bug enough for a blog post, or I don't have the energy to blog about at the time.

Mastodon (the fediverse software used by the instance I'm on) has a built-in RSS feed, if that's your jam: https://fediscience.org/@sbrl.rss

I want to do some incremental improvements to my website here soon - including tidying up and finishing the list of researchy things I've been doing on my homepage. Nothing too ground breaking (though I have bigger plans for a better backend to this blog, but I need lotsa time to impleent it)

Final thoughts

This last year has been rather stressful and emotional in many different ways - including some I have not mentioned here (like people I know very well leaving the University, including my primary supervisor, though I am maintaining regular and normal contact). I hope that 2025 is less stressful than 2024.

If there's something you'd like me to blog about that I've been doing that I haven't blogged about yet, I've probably forgotten about it. Please get in touch by leaving a comment below!

A cute wooden bauble in the dark on a christmas tree from a few years ago. It has a snowman against the night sky with a postbox with a bird sitting on it and some trees and stuff. The multicoloured christmas lights are turned on and shining brightly. I like this bauble very much.

(Source: Taken by me. See alt text for detailed description.)

Thanks for sticking with me for these last 10 years. There is ALWAYS hope. Especially when you can't see it.

--Starbeamrainbowlabs, your friendly but very tired blogger

Comments

annie:

hi. im in my second year bachelor in IT. i barely can codes. almost cannot. you have any tips. and what do you think about using chatgpt? i feel im useless and stupid because i use chatgpt. anyways your blog is cute hehe

Starbeamrainbowlabs:

Start simple and work your way up. There is a big hump when learning to program: take it one step at a time. The most important skill is to break things down. Okay, so you want to e.g. get a computer to calculate sales from a spreadsheet. How do you break the problem down? Drawing flowcharts on paper to understand the process can really help.

If you're after some manageable problems to work on, try going to my blog archive and searching for "conundrums". I have a series of coding conundrums evolved blog posts you may find useful.

Lastly, ChatGPT is useful, but usually only for simpler stuff and it has a limit to how complicated a program it can write. It is not good at writing larger codebases or complex code that does complicated things. If you do use it, I strongly recommend an extension like e.g. GitHub Copilot (free for students) that integrates better with a text editor.

To this end, there's a lot more to being a software engineer than just programming: you're the brains who decides on application design and how to organise things..... this is not something ChatGPT and friends is particularly good at!

I wrote a list of other computer sciencey skills that aren't programming recently, perhaps I should turn it into a blog post.....

Anyway, while I'm not going to say that its easy or quick or without effort, you can do it!

Always happy to answer questions etc.

and thanks for the compliment, I love colour and stuff so that influences my blog's theme :D

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