I enjoyed Rich Hickey’s talk on deconstructing the database, whereby he shows an unbundling of the concerns of transaction processing and durable storage from the concerns of a query engine, of live indexing, and of caching.

Eliot is a Python logging system that outputs a stream of JSON objects detailing causal chains of actions. Scientific computing is identified in its documentation as an ideal use case for this style of logging, in part because feedback cycles can be slow for such long-running processes where interactive step-debugging is inconvenient. It seems that such logs would also be appropriate for event sourcing.

When my kids were babies, sometimes it felt like a one-hour trip to the store required more planning than an expedition to Antarctica. We had a diaper bag we packed with all the things we thought we might need, but it was the way it was packed that mattered. Diapers and wet bags and wipes have to be accessible so they need to go at the top. So does a bottle of milk and a spit rag.

What matters for application of knowledge – what substantiates it? I think two things do: shared conceptualizations, and use cases.

A headless content management system (CMS) is one that is API-first, decoupled from any particular presentation layer on the front-end. Such a service can support multiple channels for working with and presenting content, given the type of user and their context. Strapi is one example of an open-source headless CMS.

I was asked about a positioning statement for my business, to describe who I work with and what outcome I help them with: something like “Helping X with Y”. I gave this: The response I got was “Great start. What type of researchers would be an ideal fit?” I had thought I had specialized my audience sufficiently: I’m not helping “people”, I’m helping researchers.

The four components of FAIR can be mapped to successive stages of reusability: possible, plausible, probable, and perishable. The foundational principles of FAIR are Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability. ¹ Ultimately, FAIR is all about reuse, and it’s helpful for me to think of the principles as successive stages of increasing the chance that successful reuse can happen.

In much of the developed world right now, it is possible to attend a movie but not a university lecture. This is the sort of insane fact we've gotten used to over the past few months, the sort of thing that makes us shake our heads for a moment, acknowledge that money talks, and move on with our lives.

I like Cynthia Arnold’s approach to the problem of data discovery for a materials R&D organization. In a podcast episode for Citrine, she says ¹ : An inventory, understanding what you have, is all about finding . Nothing is accessible yet, just identifiable. She goes on: This is backtracking a FAIR ² pipeline.

Microsoft Excel is known to, by default, convert gene names to dates and floating-point numbers.