The Curious Engineer

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James Hawley

jrhawley.ca

ScienceSoftware / engineering practiceEssays / personal

’15’20’25
Posts
92 from 4 Nov 2013 to 11 May 2026
Posting
monthly (6 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://jrhawley.ca/feed.xml

2026 4

  1. Write the documentation first
  2. Making a Tree-sitter parser for FASTA
  3. Philosophy of science is fascinating
  4. I like reading people's theses

2025 5

  1. We need an XDG spec for repositories
  2. It's your job to understand
  3. Performing surgery on my Zotero database
  4. Blogroll
  5. Recognizing National Indigenous Peoples Day

2024 3

  1. Science is political and always has been
  2. Most of your favourite mathematicians knew each other
  3. Resources for the successful computational biologist

2023 10

  1. Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas? Probably not.
  2. Unlearning Grad School - Part IIa: Low Stipends and Wages
  3. Unlearning Grad School - Part II: Sources of Stress
  4. Unlearning Grad School - Part I: What I Felt
  5. Unlearning Grad School
  6. Independence of mean and variance estimators
  7. Blocked by Cloudflare
  8. What's missing from values in data tables
  9. Rethinking Nix for reproducible science
  10. Cross-compiling with Rust

2022 6

  1. Just leave
  2. An Ode to My Road Bike
  3. Calculating the cosine similarity across a set of samples
  4. Killing time in a new city
  5. A command line interface for HomeBank
  6. Acting on COVID-19 rapid antigen tests

2021 18

  1. A microcosm of life: lessons learned from a PhD
  2. Testing the Nix environment manager for computational biology
  3. The 3D topology of the prostate cancer genome
  4. Parallelization isn't always faster
  5. Ignorance is strength
  6. Limit of a t distribution
  7. Documents as code and LaTeX
  8. Strings, OsStrings, and PathBufs in Rust
  9. Notes, tasks, and planning with Org mode
  10. Illumina flow cell teardown
  11. Is your null hypothesis, or your model, more likely to be rejected?
  12. Running Linux GUI applications on Windows
  13. "Buying" music sucks
  14. Understanding file permissions
  15. Pragmatic tips: Conda CLI
  16. A solution to dependency hell: static binaries by default
  17. Why I like Rust - and why it's annoying
  18. Check your references

2020 24

  1. Experimenting with web monetization
  2. Colours and the scientific eye
  3. Pragmatic tips: Emacs
  4. A more sane way to modify your PATH
  5. A collection of useful command line tools
  6. Notes from a mathematical physics degree
  7. Aggregate peak analysis with Hi-C data
  8. What is differential analysis, anyway?
  9. The Central Limit Theorem and estimation of variance
  10. Notation and thinking in math
  11. How to keep track of your bills
  12. Pragmatic tips: remote teaching
  13. Teaching stats for statistical thinking
  14. Anti-curl and Poincare's lemma
  15. Physical symmetries result from what we think good scientific theories are
  16. A marketplace of half-baked ideas
  17. Creating simple genome annotation tables
  18. Please, show your work
  19. A fully-fledged toolchain for Rust on Windows
  20. Creating a custom genome annotation for HiGlass
  21. Jeffrey Epstein, Harvard, and Martin Nowak
  22. Structuring code for ggplot
  23. A Vim user's introduction to Emacs
  24. High impact papers are not how you learn science

2019 7

  1. Reading List 2019
  2. Well-defined biology
  3. Now is an exciting time for mathematicians in the biological sciences
  4. Pragmatic guidelines for bioinformatics software tools
  5. Pragmatic tips: Conda Packages
  6. Designing dark academic posters
  7. Academic twitter isn't for me

2018 7

  1. The cleverness behind Tajima's D statistic
  2. Don't trust your data at first glance
  3. "Support" over "coverage"
  4. The woes of using bioinformatics software: a case study in trying to install ChAMP
  5. PubMed + RSS for following specific authors
  6. Git flow for scientific analysis
  7. How I Maintain a Reproducible Computational Environment

2017 2

  1. PubPeer for Microsoft Edge
  2. Using GitHub Pages in Visual Studio Code

2015 3

  1. Visualizing layered fluids in a rotating reference frame
  2. CRISPieR: Re-engineering CRISPR-Cas9 with functional applications in eukaryotic systems
  3. Quasi-geostrophic models and Hamiltonian dynamics

2014 2

  1. Staphylocide: Stopping Antibiotic Resistance Through Gene Silencing
  2. Quantum Communication Complexity

2013 1

  1. Controlled Modification and Intercellular Transmission of a DNA Message