Jul 20, 2018

Awesome Kepler-Inspired Artwork

I attended an awesome art show opening reception in San Francisco last night. The experience inspired me to write a post in my personal blog, my first in over two years. The show "Observations from the Unknown" is a solo exhibition of Owen Gildersleeve, celebrating Kepler's nine-year mission. It's up until August 31, 2018.

Nov 25, 2015

How do astronomers discover resources?

Information sharing within the astronomy community occurs through many avenues. In this blog post I point out that the current information sharing avenues are lacking an outlet for user contributed, community-curated, open-access content about astronomy specific resources. I provide an implementation of this forum, called Awesome Astronomy, which is inspired by the Awesome lists on GitHub.

Nov 15, 2015

Installing on Mac with Brew, Dotfiles, Conda

There are tons of awesome software packages, modules, scripts, repositories, and apps out there. This blog post is about the software and strategies for configuration management on one's personal computer, as told from my recent experience installing software on a new laptop. Is there a "right way" to install software?

Sep 24, 2015

post PhD, China, books about computers

I got a PhD, had a great summer, learned a little more about computers, and moved to China.

Apr 10, 2015

Astronomers using Slack

New modes of communication have enhanced information sharing among graduate students at UT Austin.

Mar 2, 2015

astrodock is a viral Twitter meme

astrodock is a viral Twitter meme, in which astronomers take screenshots of their OSX and Linux dock icons to share their preferences of software tools. Last Wednesday night one of my harmless tweets inadvertantly catalyzed this meme. The meme drew attention to the challenge of staying current with technology in the constantly evolving scientific software ecosystem. There is an opportunity for a grassroots resource that informs scientists of the software preferences in their domain.

Mar 2, 2015

The first UT Austin astronomy hack day

The UT Austin Astronomy Department graduate students and postdocs held their first hack day on Friday January 16, 2015. We had 10 attendees and worked on 7 different projects. This post summarizes the motivation, project outcomes, and lessons learned from our first experience.

Mar 2, 2015

Setting up Starfish at TACC for the astro hack day

The UT Austin Astronomy Department graduate students and postdocs held their first hack day on Friday January 16, 2015. This post chronicles my project aimed at deriving physical properties from stellar spectra, but ended up being about setting up a supercomputer.