When we see a world-class musician flawlessly play challenging music, it can be tempting to imagine that they were always able to do so. A moment's thought makes it obvious that they must have had to spend huge amounts of time practising basic techniques in order to reach that level. One thing that most of us don't consider is that they have to continue spending considerable amounts of time simply to maintain that technique, let alone expand it. In contrast, in programming, we have only a haphazard notion of how one should go about obtaining sufficient technique to become good enough to write good software; and we have almost no notion of continued practise to maintain or expand that technique.

How do research papers end up looking the way that they do? I take two papers that I've been involved with and detail the human story behind them and their underlying research. You may also wish to look at the accompanying animations https://youtube.com/watch?v=1IgtLLPL9GY and https://youtube.com/watch?v=JCamO4P10NY

All of us have points in our lives where we have to decide whether we should continue down our current path or change to another. As a researcher, I often face a constrained version of this problem: should I continue on my current research path or change to another? For a long time I wasn't aware that I was being faced with such decisions; and, when I did become aware, I wasn't sure how best to make a decision. Over time I've realised that a simple "stick or twist?" heuristic mostly works well for me. I don’t claim that anything in this article is novel, nor do I think I'm describing an approach that’s applicable to every situation - but it might provide some useful food for thought.

With slowly increasing frequency, I am asked for my advice on life or careers, or something similar. Let us put aside worries about this sign of my increasing decrepitude or the poor taste that some people show in those from whom they seek advice. The brutal truth is that most of the advice that I've received as an adult - nearly all of which has been well intentioned - has not been right for me. I therefore assume that any advice I might give others would be equally wrong, and so I try and avoid doing so. In this blog post, I will try to enumerate the problems I have with advice as it is commonly given and look at one way that we can do things differently.