What I'm up to

I have been a bit quiet, mostly due to the holidays and general busyness. While I don’t have anything ready to go, there are some fun things coming down the line:

1. I have been converting the CA-Rice physiological model to Go.

Why this model? I reached out to Bard Miller, and he was kind enough to send the source code. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the code was simple, well-organized, and generally easy to make sense of. In the world of researcher created code, this is pretty rare. Second, it was created for CA rice, so there is a very good chance that it will handle conditions here better than the models written for tropical conditions (e.g., ORYZA). It would be a waste for all the original work to rot away on a floppy disk (yes, a 5" floppy).

Why Go? It is a fun language that I have been wanting to learn better. As I often tell my students, you cannot learn a programming language by listening/reading about it. You actually need to work through a real problem. I have ambitious plans for this model, ones that Go is well suited for.

Where is it? Currently on a private repo. The model runs perfectly, but I have big plans - retrieving data from remote sources, forecasting with uncertainty, etc. Before I make it public, I want to make sure the original authors are OK with this use.

2. I also have been making dynamic data visualizations using D3.

Why? Cause they are cool, and while I love R, the rest of the world is working off a web browser. You can make some cool visualizations using tools such as plotly, but I always run into the limitations of these tools. I am much more comfortable working with more basic building blocks.

3. Some webscraping and an analytics dashboard

Top secret. :P

4. Beyond that, I am writing writing writing…

I have 3 papers in the works that need to go out yesterday.

Stay tuned. Some cool stuff is in the works.