Reboot
I am informally notified today that my application for the position of assistant research fellow at the Institute of Information Science (IIS), Academia Sinica (the national academy of Taiwan) has been approved (after a long wait — the application was submitted back in April), and I can expect to start at the beginning of the next year. The position is essentially a tenure-track assistant professorship without teaching duties, which in particular implies that I’ll be able to pursue my own research directions (some of which I’ll probably write about soon).
More autonomy also means that I’ll have to manage myself more effectively, and one of the readjustments I want to make is to pick up the habit of blogging again. I blogged regularly during my undergraduate years, but didn’t continue to do so afterwards (except for a small number of posts written when I was in the UK), which I regret — some posts are embarrassing to read today, but in general the blog posts serve as valuable snapshots of what I was thinking and doing during that period.
But the biggest inspiration behind this reboot was probably Jeremy Gibbons’s visit to Tokyo in October 2018. (The visit was significant in other ways; maybe a story for another time.) Jeremy came with a talk on ‘asymmetric numeral systems’ (ANS), about which he eventually published a paper at MPC 2019. Before his visit he had written a blog post on ANS, which I read together with Zhixuan Yang (a student at NII back then). The post enabled us to go into the details and provide comments that Jeremy thought were helpful enough to deserve an acknowledgement at the end of the MPC’19 paper. I have known that writing up stuff helps oneself to better organise their thoughts, but the experience also showed that it’s a very effective way of letting other people know and help with what one’s doing (especially before publishing a paper), and I don’t want to miss such opportunities.
I also want the blog posts to serve as short-term goals that complement the longer-term ones, in particular paper publication. I don’t (haven’t been able to) publish frequently, and the satisfaction I get from successfully publishing a paper doesn’t usually last long enough until publishing the next one. On the other hand, if I write up the intermediate results (be they big or small) more frequently, I’ll get a concrete feel that things are being done in shorter cycles, and as the posts accumulate they translate into a sense of satisfaction. Even if it only appears that things are being done, it’ll be easier to monitor and evaluate the progress.
The blog will be like a diary (as before) and will probably be more about PL research, although I won’t restrict myself to writing about research, and will sometimes write in Chinese if it’s more convenient. I don’t intend to polish my blog posts too much, so that I don’t have to spend too much time writing them and can post more frequently — my target frequency is one or two posts per week, although there will most likely be blank periods, e.g., before submitting a paper (when I won’t feel like writing other stuff) and during paper reviewing (which I can’t write about). The blog posts are written mainly for myself and people close to me: it won’t be my priority to make the posts accessible to a wide audience, I won’t advertise them publicly except putting the latest few posts on the front page of my website, and there won’t be a mechanism for leaving comments (but do contact me if you want to discuss anything).
The absence of a commenting mechanism is also due to the fact that my blogging ‘system’ is crafted by myself. The posts are written in Markdown, and then processed and translated into HTML by a Haskell script I write, which also updates the front page and the blog’s index page. In this way, I get full control over the HTML generation and formatting, but more advanced stuff like a commenting mechanism is currently beyond me. Not having a commenting mechanism allows me not to worry about managing (spam and other irrelevant) comments though, so it’s not necessarily a bad decision.
I wanted to open this blog at the same time I start working at IIS, but now decide not to wait any longer seeing that there’s still more than a month before I can be there and during this period of time I might want to write something. On the other hand, this period of time is like a long vacation which I probably won’t get before I retire, and maybe I should just relax…
