It’s the end of the year, so I decided I had to do my semestral wrestling bout with Hugo to go over what happened in the past 12 months.
To start with, as I haven’t updated the website in months, I have been welcomed by an error message, which further complicates my relationship with this platform. Seriously though, every time I try to write something here I spend more time debugging Hugo than I do writing.
Overall, most of the year was devoted to “the paper”, that one article I have been working on for the past two years. Said paper has been rejected three times (so far), and we are still working on it. Supposedly, we should be done with it this January, but who knows what the future actually holds.
What else? Well, my contract as a post-doc ended, and now I am working as a research engineer at Inria, working on Skrub. Overall, I am interacting with a lot of the same people while working on a library that I find interesting and that still lets me run experiments.
I should start looking for a new position soon enough, but first I’d like to get the paper done with.
I went to PyData Paris 2024, which was a very interesting experience (though quite tiring, as I went there in the same period I was moving to a different place), meeting a lot of brilliant people in the field I would like to keep on working in.
I would say that the year has been very stressful, with burnout waiting for me after pretty much every paper deadline, and some extremely disappointing experience in Academia. On the other hand, it was also a very instructive year as I feel like I learned a lot about data science, machine learning, note taking, proper software development, and some more. So, swings and roundabouts?
If I have to come up with a theme for 2025, I think it will be something along the lines of “read more sources”. I have been saving all sorts of scholarly articles, blog posts, guides, essays, books, and proceeded to read maybe 1% of the collection. My hope is that by the time this day rolls around next year, I’ll be able to look back and think that I was able to read what I save, rather than just hoard articles.
That said, see you around in the next update (whenever that may be, and if Hugo allows…). Happy 2025!