Check out my new website at the University of California, Davis!
I’ve accepted a position as assistant professor at UC Davis starting summer 2023. 🌞🌞🌞 So, you can generally find the most up-to-date information about me at my UC Davis page. I may or may not post here for the short- and long-term future.
By the way, I’m hiring PhD students! 🙂 I would love to hear from you if you’re interested in getting a PhD in programming languages research.
I’m on the academic job market this year, and have spent the last few months writing (and rewriting) application materials. It’s a process that really makes you figure out who you are as a researcher and it’s turned out to be surprisingly useful and fun. I designed a diagram of my research areas (actually, credits to Ariana for the final image, she made it in ChemDraw!) and I’m really happy with the way it turned out! See below (this is Figure 2 in my research statement):
I am thinking of making some visualizations of my research in other ways, maybe not for the research statement, but perhaps for my website. I have spreadsheet data for all the papers I’ve ever submitted, with conference tiers, rejections, areas, etc. and that could make for some interesting summary tables.
PSA: vetted installation instructions and examples/ directory considered mandatory
Having been on academic “artifact evaluation committees” a few times, there are many ways the process fails to encourage some of the most important aspects of making software reusable. The biggest glaring problem is installation: in my experience, 90% of the pain of trying to reuse someone else’s software or git repository is just trying to get the tool and its dependencies installed, and the present system almost completely ignores this by having researchers submit pre-built virtual machines, so that the installation process is not checked at all by the reviewers.
Besides installation, all software should have an examples/ directory.
I am surprised by how often I come across software that doesn’t, and I spend several minutes poking around trying to understand the software without much luck. A basic examples/ helps a lot more than well-documented code, unit tests, or even a README because it’s the first place I will go to see how I might actually use your project for some intended use case.