Some while ago I had an interesting discussion concerning the different approaches to workflow organisation and learning. It happened around at the same time, that I’ve discovered the Vimium browser extension. This coincidence lead me to write this blog-post about the workflow organisation and usage of shortcuts in everyday life. To keep the content simple, I’ll start with some general ideas on using shortcuts and then present some advantages of using their Vim-style version.

Lately, I’ve taken a break from the technical publications about R and informatics in general. This is mostly because I was distracted by a more immediate problems: the choice of a bike for this academic year. My contract with the Metrovelo, the most popular bike-rental company in Grenoble, has expired around 10-th september, pushing me to reconsider my travel choices.

In Grenoble, as in many other european towns, the transportation choices are more versatile than in Moscow, or any northern cities in general. So what are the alternatives?

Personally I have rather mixed feeling towards the wishlists. Even though having a list of gifts is convenient, it somewhat reduces the joy. However, after some recent discussions I’ve realised that probably creating some sort of wishlist may be not such a bad idea. But making this “wishlist” useful for some other people may be an even better idea.

So, what can be interesting for people who adore gadgets and tinkering, preferring at the same time to stick with some Open Source solutions? Well, first of all I’ve looked through some suggestions and gift-lists over the Internet, but was astonished by sometimes ill chosen ideas. Mugs with UNIX memes? Tee-shirts with TUX? FOSS based symbolic and sometimes absolutely useless accessories? Evidently, it’s only my point of view, but such things are rather boring and uninteresting.

My name is Nikita Gusarov and I’m currently doing my Doctoral studies at the University Grenoble Alpes located in France.

My work is primarily focused on exploration of the performances of Discrete Choice Models (DCM) in modelling individual behaviour. This is a rather breathtaking topic, because of its interdisciplinary nature. I have to deal at the same time with different techniques from quite distant fields, among which:

• Statistics
• Econometrics
• Machine Learning
• Combinatorics and Optimisation

As well as various behavioural theories, specific for several domains: