A delightful new ecosystem of open source productivity tools has taken shape over the last few years. Just in the last year, I’ve found myself using Quarto and Typst extensively for typesetting letters of recommendation, grants, and lecture slides. Separating content from formatting pays dividends in complex documents, and the time to learn these tools was a rewarding investment. I’ve also found aider and Simon Wilson’s LLM, with Llama, extremely useful for learning new syntax and tackling more complex tasks. For instance, I recently rebuilt my CV and lab website to pull in the list of trainees, awards, grants, and papers all from shared YAML files. I am mostly unfamiliar with the Jekyll (Ruby) and Typst syntax, but an LLM could get me 99% of the way there. This means that the upfront cost of these more powerful tools is greatly reduced.

It has been four years since I last posted.

It is hard for me to comprehend that it has been this long. I wasn’t a frequent blogger—my pace before was about once or twice per year. However, writing is a part of thinking, and many of the subjects I posted about were ideas I cared and had thought through deeply.

In thinking about what changed, it is difficult to pinpoint any one factor. One definite possibility is greater work demands, both in my time and mental bandwidth. My lab has gotten bigger, we are participating in more collaborative work, and I have a clearer vision for our impact than ever before. My other roles, such as an educator, have also expanded and become more complicated. I am teaching larger classes that have become a core component of our major, and education has become more challenging due to various factors, including the pandemic, large language model use, and challenges with student mental health.

I also think some contributory factors are personal. We are beginning to learn about the harms of addiction-driven social media, and I do think some of my mental energies were lost to those systems. Twitter’s dismantling, and scattering of users, was a useful reminder that social media is not real life, and that users are the product within these networks. I also think that I have become more conservative about the ideas I put out into the world. I don’t think this is a good thing. If writing is a process of thinking, it has to start in an unrefined state.

Visiting my graduate alma mater this past fall, I was reminded how important blogging used to be to me. Two individuals who I deeply respect separately brought up my writing from over a decade ago. My very last post, on cancer autoantibodies, was the kernel of an idea that has become a critical research area for my lab, funded by my Mark Foundation Emerging Leader Award. The project has incredibly exciting results, and may turn out to be my most impactful scientific work. It is safe to say that I wouldn’t be where I am today without this outlet.

While I want to return to blogging, it is a habit that I will have to build again. I plan to make several changes to facilitate this. I am going to try to embrace shorter posts, with small ideas, posting material I might have tweeted about before. Likewise, I am also going to try link blogging more, as this site can be a repository for items I typically save to Pinboard.