Damn, It’s Been Two Years Already?

Thoughts on the Two Year Anniversary of This Blog

I did not write a lot on this blog this year – I have been incredibly busy. However, I am very happy to report that the blog has not died! I still managed to post some stuff here and there despite all of the craziness, and I’ve very happy with the quality of all of the blog posts I did manage to publish. I’m not as proud of all of the draft blog posts I started that I’ve yet to finish, but oh, well. You win some, you lose some. I still managed to write some spur-of-the moment angry rants but post them shortly thereafter, which I think is really what the spirit of this space existing is all about.

All things considered, I think this year of running the blog has been reasonably successful. Plus, I finally pulled the trigger and started the Shorts section of the blog, which I’ve been meaning to do for years now.1 I would highly recommend taking a look there!

Here’s to two years of this blog existing! I’m still not convinced that anyone actually reads it (if you do, please reach out), but writing this thing keeps me sane, and I love having my own space on the internet.

Revisiting last year’s “goals”

Last year, I made four loose goals for the year, not that I took them super seriously – this blog is, and has always been, a hobby that I try not to take too seriously, lest I lose the momentum to do it.

  1. Get a search bar up and running on this thing.

I still want to do this, but honestly, at this point it’s a much lower priority to me than actually writing things, and I’m already not writing here as much as I’d like.

  1. Write more of the posts where I review things, because I actually go back to them when I’m looking for links to things.

I think this was actually pretty successful, but I’ve decided that I am not a huge fan of the linkdump format I’ve been doing – it’s way too much effort, since I don’t write them as I go, so going back and doing the summaries eats up way too much time. I might start to streamline them and straight up just post links with quotes from the three or four most impactful articles. And I really, really want to get back to doing the longer form reviews I used to do. I didn’t write any of those this year.

  1. Try to broaden the range of topics that I write about and the approaches I take to writing about them.

I, uh, completely failed at this one.

  1. Try not to be afraid of writing shorter posts, if the idea is short. Sometimes I like them the best.

About a third of my blog posts this year were under 1000 words in length, which is about the same ratio as last year. I think I just tend to have longer-form thoughts, and that isn’t likely to change any time soon.

My favourite blog posts from this year of blogging

This is the blog post where I pioneered the (slightly sarcastic) imagined Q & A format, and I love it. It is so, so fun to write this way. (Also, I do actually think it contains good advice for starting a blog.)

I’m thinking that I might start doing a yearly list of blogs I’ve read and found interesting as part of my yearly anniversary post. I really enjoyed that section of this article, and it would be interesting to see how it evolves.

What Makes a Graduate-Level Course Different From a Senior Undergraduate Course?

This blog post was a long time coming. I think people are really terrible at articulating exactly how it is that the education system works and what it is that we’re all supposed to be getting out of it, and in my opinion, this general sense of confusion actually increases the further you get into your education. Academia is notorious for being an opaque mess, and I hate it.

I wrote this blog post because I’d tried and failed to get people to explain to me how the expectations for coursework change once you become a grad student. I ended up taking some grad courses while I was still in undergrad, both for credit and as an auditing student, and I ended up discovering that sometimes the expectations really are super different! And also, sometimes they aren’t that different, but then they’re not really grad courses, but rather fourth-year courses that happen to have grad students in them.

I think this article probably has the best description I’ve written of what research training is like, so here’s a quote:

Researchers are professional experts – they know things for a living, and more specifically, they know things no one else knows for a living. The problem is that you can’t become an expert purely by being taught things by other people, because if you know something because someone else taught it to you, it’s no longer something no one else knows. The point of doing research is to learn something no one else knows. Sure, you then publish that information and add it to the sum of “human knowledge,” but broadly speaking, research is about trying to ask questions that no one has answered yet and then answering them. In the process of doing this, you end up learning pretty much everything there is to know about the topic you’re researching.

This is the point of grad school. You learn how to be a person who knows things no one else knows, and as a side effect, you become an expert (usually in something extremely niche and specialized that no one else really cares about).

I wish I had this article when I was signing up for my fourth year courses, but I didn’t, so now you get 6000 words of lessons distilled from my pain.

Types of Questions (Part 1)

I like this point because of the content, mainly. Anyone who has known me for any length of time has undoubtedly noticed that I ask a lot of questions, and one thing I’m especially curious about is what makes a question “good” or “useful”. This post came from trying to categorize the different types of questions I ask and why and when I tend to ask them.

30-Minute Meetings Are a Scam, Revisited

I think half-hour meetings suck and I wrote almost 4000 words about it. (I also wrote a shorter, 600 word article on the same topic.) This is a super comprehensive rant in which I give lots of examples and make a detailed case for eliminating half-hour meetings in what I hope is a persuasive way.

The Researcher Alignment Matrix

Researchers are crazy, and I made a fun chart to categorize the different flavours of researcher craziness. I love these sorts of posts. I hope I can write some more of them next year.

Some goals for this year of blogging

As always, I’m not going to make real goals, because I do this thing for fun, but here are the big ones that are on my mind:

  1. Write more posts! I miss writing on this space.
  2. Turn more of my presentations into archival blog posts.
  3. Write more of the long-form “Some Interesting Things I’ve Read lately” posts.
  4. Diversify what I write about! I would really love to write more “technical deep-dive” type articles…
  5. Get a search bar up and running on this blog.

Appendix: Everything I’ve posted on my blog in the last year

New stuff, written specifically for the blog

Here’s a list of all of the new articles I wrote for the blog, in chronological order and with included word counts.2

So that’s 9 blog posts that I wrote from scratch, which is about a third of my output from last year. This tracks pretty well with the general sense I’ve had about the amount of personal writing I’ve been doing – I didn’t really feel like I wrote much this year. Even worse, I’ve started a lot of blog posts that I haven’t finished, and the weight of all that unfinished writing has been bothering me for a while. I’ve been too busy doing other things, unfortunately.

It does, however, seem like when I have less time to write new posts, I default to posting a few long posts, rather than many short ones for whatever reason. The total word count for this year was just over 19,000 words, which is about half last year’s word count.

Adaptations of existing stuff I’d (at least partially) written for other reasons

A lot of the other stuff I’ve posted on the blog has been adapted from elsewhere, or straight up been stolen from my other work. That’s the luxury of having my own space on the internet: I can do whatever the heck I want here.

Overall, I did a pretty terrible job of adapting existing work I’d already written for other reasons for the internet. This is a shame, because I’ve actually been writing a lot of stuff! (Grad students do a lot of writing.) Maybe in the next year of this blog I can focus more on making work I’ve already done publicly available to people.

Linkdump-style articles

For whatever reason, I thought linkdump-style articles were taking over my blog, but I’ve only posted five of them this year! The real problem is that I haven’t been writing very many regular posts this year. Oh, well.

  1. I think the shorts drive their own separate round-up pieces, though - I’ll get to those some other time. ↩︎

  2. These word counts don’t include footnotes, though some of these have long footnotes sections. I’m a very big fan of footnotes. ↩︎