Week one

So this is the first one.

If you got here from an email, you signed up for it back in March, and then heard nothing for six months. Sorry about that. I kept meaning to write and then kept not writing, and the longer it went the more it felt like the first post had to be good, and that made it worse. You know how it goes.

I'm done waiting for a good one. One post a week from now on. Some of them will be bad. This might be one of them, I can't tell yet.

I don't really know what I'll write about. Probably what I'm working on, because that's most of my day. Right now that's machine learning for materials science, which is a long way of saying I train models to guess things about molecules and metals so that nobody has to run a simulation that takes a week. Some of those posts will get technical. I'll try to keep them readable, and if I fail, skip that week, I won't be offended. Probably Germany, because I've been here just under a year and most days it still surprises me. Probably football, sorry. Some weeks it'll just be whatever I've been thinking about, which lately is a lot of things at once.

A lot of you are my parents' friends, which I only realised when I looked at the subscriber list. Hi. I'm fine, how are y'all?

The real reason I'm doing this, if I'm honest, is that this last year changed me more than any year before it. New country, new field, a lot of firsts, a few lasts. And I've noticed that I'm not very good at noticing that while it's happening. I only see it afterwards, looking back, and by then I've already become someone slightly different and can't quite remember how I got there.

So I want to write it down while it's happening. What I was thinking about on a normal Tuesday, in the middle of it. Not the cleaned-up version I'll tell people later. The real one.

Not all of it will make it in here, though. Some parts of this year I'm keeping to myself. Not because they didn't matter. Because they did.

That part is mostly for me. But if you're reading, you're welcome to. A lot of you I don't get to talk to much anymore, and this is easier than trying to catch up with everyone one at a time.

I'll probably miss a week at some point and blame Spurs. Those of you who follow football will understand. Those of you who don't, count yourselves lucky. I'll probably write some things I regret. But there'll be a post, and that's the only thing I'm promising. Ask me again in a hundred days whether I kept it.

If you want to say something back, there's a guestbook, or you can comment under any post. I read everything, even if I'm slow to reply.

Okay. That's week one. See you next week.