Ok, so Twitter informs me that I’m already 5% too late but I guess that’s a reflection of how busy the start to 2019 has been for me. Still, I think it’s important to take some time to really think about the year ahead.
I was lucky enough to be selected for the AAAS Community Engagement Fellows Program, which gives me the chance to professionalise the work that I currently do coordinating the Bio-IT Project at EMBL. Last Friday, I returned from DC after attending the first training week that kicked off the fellowship year. I’ll report in more detail on that in a separate post in the next couple of days. For now, I can say that it gave me plenty to think about and to implement to improve the work that we’re doing to build our computational biology/bioinformatics community.
I decided to take a step back from my involvement in The Carpentries for the first few months of the year. It’s a project that’s become very important to me, and a global community of instructors that I’ve found very inspiring, but I over-committed myself in 2018 and I really started to feel the strain towards the end of the year. I have an instructor training workshop scheduled for the beginning of April and I guess that will be my first contribution of any weight in 2019. For now, I’m focusing on getting healthy and sleeping well.
So what about the rest of 2019? On a personal level, we’ve got a campervan on order, a holiday to the Bay Area to look forward to, and plenty of musical highlights coming up. We’re also both waiting to see what happens on 29th March and how that affects our status as Brits living in Germany. No politics on this blog, though. If you want stuff to read about Brexit, I doubt you’ll have to look far elsewhere to find it.
From a professional perspective, I’m hoping that my colleague Malvika and I can find the time to make the Bio-IT Project more inclusive and sustainable, while still branching out into new and exciting areas. There will be at least one group project to work on as part of the CEFP fellowship. There’s CarpentryConnect Manchester to look forward to, I hope to get to the inaugural de-RSE conference in Potsdam, Greg and I are still working on JavaScript vs Data Science (feedback still welcome!), and I’d also really like to put some meat on the bones of one of his other books, Still Magic. And I will get back into the Carpentries groove at some point.
So, a lot to keep me going. More posts to come on most of the topics listed above.