Blog
The North Point Half Marathon: Boston's Newest Half Marathon
The course: the circular island in North Point Park. (Cambridge Orthophoto 2021)
Reprising the now-familiar and widely beloved bottle-marathon format, I hosted the first North Point Half Marathon. The course is 119 laps of the island in North Point Park. It just so happens that the island is technically within the city of Boston, though the park entrance is in Cambridge. Looking forward to the marathon in years to come.
Started a Postdoc at MIT
I’ve joined MIT CSAIL as a postdoc in Andreea Bobu’s CLEAR Lab. I’ll be helping robots that learn from people communicate what they’re uncertain about, so the people teaching them can see where their input is needed.
Light Rail Relay 2025 Draws 14 Teams and Four Solo Finishers
For my last run as a Seattleite, I got to run the length of the 1 Line one last time. It was a bittersweet farewell, but there is no better way to say goodbye to the whole city at once.
Even better was sharing the corridor with 14 teams and four solo runners for our biggest Light Rail Relay yet. Ahead of the race, Sara Morimoto wrote an op-ed in The Urbanist capturing the ethos:
“…an event that encourages participants to explore unfamiliar pockets of the city, make new friends, and do something together that they probably wouldn’t do alone… celebrate[ing] navigating the city without a car.”
An event this big only works because of the community behind it. Huge thanks to Zach Tatlock for taking over baton manufacturing, Margaret Li for steering the club squad through its scheduling puzzle, James Yoo for start line logistics, and all the team captains and runners who showed up.
A Sticky Note Hack for Finishing Things
My end-of-PhD sticky note pile.
There’ve been many moments over the past few months when I’ve felt haunted by the things I would rather be doing. An idea floats by—something that in a normal time I’d read about that night, or spend a Saturday making—but that found me totally occupied. I tried batting them away at first, but they’d come back. It was distracting and kind of distressing. It felt like they were my subconscious forcing me to consider that, if I couldn’t engage with what my mind actually thought was interesting, maybe I was doing something wrong.
Then I realized that they were only coming back because they didn’t want to be forgotten. So I started writing them down, as soon as they’d arrive, one to a sticky note. And they stopped coming back. I got a quiet my mind and a physical manifestation of what I was working toward. There’s probably a post about this idea somewhere on 43folders, but I’m writing this anyway in case it finds someone else with the same problem.
At this point I don’t remember much of what’s in the pile (it’s about a pad and a half, plus some mail I didn’t have the bandwidth the deal with), and I’ve spent my first couple unoccupied days cleaning my apartment instead of looking through them. But it worked. I’m here, and they’re there, ready for tomorrow.
I Successfully Defended My PhD
Dr. Walker
Thank you, Maya, Sidd, Josh and Martin for making time early on one of the busiest Friday’s of the quarter.
Keep Untracked Files Handy with a Global .gitignore Pattern
I often find myself in a situation where I have a file that I want to keep around, but don’t want to commit to the repository. Things like notes (todo.txt) or examples (bug_repro.py) or maybe an uncompressed version of an image (banner_xxl.jpg). They could live somewhere outside the source tree, but I like to keep them close to the code they relate to so I don’t forget about them.
Instead of cluttering every repo’s .gitignore with one-off rules, I adopted the prefix _#_ for any file or directory I want Git to ignore. This way I can just add the pattern to the global .gitignore rules (at $HOME/.config/git/ignore by default on macOS):
_#_*
Simple, but it keeps my workflow clean and my untracked files where I can find them.