Blog revival
Nikita Gusarov
After some difficult time without much ideas about how to write, and what to write about, I’ve decided to review this blog. Many things have happened since I’ve last time update this page: new Machine Learning courses, participation in the AIMS2 program preparation, first time teaching of the M2 Econometrics course and many more. In this post I’ll attempt to describe some of my new ideas concerning this blog’s past and future. I hope that the next several months will be marked by an uptake in the activity on this blog with some new interesting topics to come.
Some background
The last I’ve wrote something in this blog was yet in September. For the last publications I’ve had some difficulties to keep inventing topics which might be potentially interesting for anyone visiting this page, as well as for myself. The need to keep writing something simple clashed with my personal reticence to write anything which has night to no added value. As one can observe in the history of the publications, I’ve started with some intermediate level stuff on LaTeX and R usage. This trend was followed with some more personal posts, which in their turn included my personal observations, experience and research, targeting some external readers. After this two stages, I’ve stopped completely to add anything new on this page, because of complete lack of ideas on what to write about.
Anything below highly advanced topics seemed like a web pollution, while it was rather complex to invent and write anything of the due level. In fact, this tendency coincided with the trends I’ve observed in my academic writing. Some of my professional projects (here I mean the unpublished papers) are in quite identical stage as the website development. The material, which is huge and already collected rests without any proceedings simply because I can not find how to write about it. Some simple paper for publication sake is too banal for me to write it, while something novel and advanced will inevitably result in hundred-page manuscript, which will never be published.
Moreover, that time coincided with the start of the courses in the Doctoral School and some of the activity in the University. The possibility to add some more advanced perspective on the ML techniques and estimation methods took nearly all my time, distracting from other objectives.
The combination of these two, kept me away from writing for quite a long time: without ideas and with a rather credible excuse for not pushing myself.
Changes
I can name the last discussion with my PhD directors (I. Joly and P. Lemaire) to be the turning point of this stagnation. After our latest discussion on the advances of my PhD, I’ve got an interesting suggestion: I should define the target audience for the blog more clearly. Evidently, it is a rather important point. Till now I’ve posted all the materials targeting the vast audience of whomever may see my blog someday. It was a wrong approach right from the start. Someone proficient with R or LaTeX will never be interested with my discoveries about these languages. While someone, who is only familiarising with these tools, will probably find my posts too difficult to access.
This brings us to a redefinition of the objectives for my future publications. No more I’ll attempt to keep in line with some imaginary standards of interesting topics, but I’ll rather write about anything I find interesting for myself. For example, some tips and tricks one can do with help of R software, or some reminders on how to do something in LaTeX. This will result in somewhat heterogeneous level of publications, but it will probably keep a uniform path if someone would like to follow my blog.
What is more, I would like to add some new topics to my blog contents. Among them, my recent (not so recent in fact) interest in UNIX operating systems and FOS Software. During the last year I’ve nearly fully switched to the FOSS ecosystem and I would definitely like to document some of my experience.