Hello! 👋

This is my first email from Buttondown. I've just migrated from the Substack, for various reasons. If you're reading this, your subscription carried over. You don't need to do anything.

Speaking of a new home, I've moved from Indiana University to the University of Virginia's School of Data Science, after about 14 years in Bloomington. It's been a big transition, and that was one of the reasons why I haven't sent out any emails for a while.

Now, a quick round-up of recent things:

Claude Code — I've been using Anthropic's AI coding agent and wrote up my evolving notes on how to use it effectively: when to let it run, how to think about verification, and why you probably shouldn't over-engineer your setup around it. As I use it more, I'm more excited and scared at the same time. These agentic systems will completely change how we work. Take a look at this post "My AI Adoption Journey" by Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Ghostty and many others). I totally agree that chatbot -> agent transition is a fundamental change and I'd recommend to try this for everyone who's doing any coding.

howto — A tiny tool I made because I kept forgetting CLI commands. It uses Claude Code to translate plain English into shell commands. Nothing fancy, but surprisingly useful day-to-day.

GitHub Workflow — I've updated this brief guide on choosing the right GitHub workflow for academic research teams. I feel that most teams either treat GitHub as a shared Dropbox or try to adopt a full open-source process. I think a lean middle ground with short-lived branches and lightweight code review is a good compromise.

Python Environment Setup — A guide to modern Python environment setup using uv. If you're still juggling pip, venv, and requirements.txt, I think there's a much smoother and faster way now.

Dynamite plot — A perennial pet peeve: so-called dynamite plots, which are the bar plots with error bars, that are rarely a good plotting choice. This explains why and what to use instead.

LaTeX Pet peeves — Another rant... My very personal list of LaTeX gripes: non-breaking spaces, proper references, and other small things that will probably not matter too much (unless you're working with me).

Btw, these pages are living documents in my wiki and will be updated in the future.

That's it for now. More soon!

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