This is the first article on the site, so it’s a decent place to explain what I plan to use it for.
Why write notes in public#
Most of what I do at the bench and on the keyboard ends up in a private notebook. That notebook is great for me, but it has two failure modes: the entries I never come back to (because they were half-formed and only made sense for a week), and the entries other people could have benefited from but never saw.
Writing for a public audience — even a small one — forces a minimum level of clarity. It also creates a search-indexable trail of what I’ve already figured out, which is useful when I inevitably re-derive something six months later.
What belongs here#
Roughly four flavours of post:
- Methodology notes. Why I do X this way, what the alternatives were, what I’d change next time. Think “things I’d say in a whiteboard session with a new lab-mate.”
- Paper summaries. A one-page distillation of a paper I’ve read carefully — claim, method, weak spots.
- Experiment write-ups. What I measured, why, what the result was, and what I got wrong the first time.
- Side projects and hobby pieces. Less formal — books, things I’m learning, the occasional rant.
There’s no separate “professional” and “personal” section; tags do the sorting. If you want only research-style notes, look at methodology and paper-notes.
Navigating#
The Articles index has a curated reading list and a topic browser. The sidebar on the right of each post holds its table of contents — useful for the longer methodology pieces.