Last week my academic citations crossed 1000. It’s a number I’ve been watching approach for a while - a quiet milestone that means more to me than I expected. For someone who has moved from pure research into IT, it’s a reminder that scientific work has a long tail. Why Citations Matter Citations are science’s way of saying “this work was useful.” Each one represents another researcher who found something in your work worth building upon....
The Christmas break gave me something I rarely get during the year: time to learn without urgency. Two threads of exploration converged in interesting ways - one practical, one theoretical, both about AI’s role in how we work. Hands-On: Claude Code I spent part of the break experimenting with Claude Code, finally putting it through its paces on a problem that had defeated me for years: refactoring my Emacs configuration. Seven minutes of AI-assisted work accomplished what months of Sunday afternoons couldn’t....
Happy New Year! Looking back through this blog, I’m struck by how much the year was about making deliberate choices, about the tools I use, the content I consume, and the quality I produce. Breaking Free Early in the year, I left the algorithm behind and rediscovered independent blogs, RSS feeds, and mindful content consumption. It was a small change that had an outsized impact on my headspace. Turns out, you don’t need an algorithm to find interesting things....
I use Emacs and Org mode extensively for managing notes, documents, and related assets. One recurring friction point in my workflow has been accessing Org attachments outside of Emacs, particularly when I need to copy files into other tools such as PowerPoint, Word, or other document systems. Org mode’s attachment system (org-attach) is excellent at managing and organising files, but its interaction model is primarily Emacs-centric (via Dired). Sometimes, however, the fastest path is to open the attachment directory directly in the operating system’s file explorer....
In large enterprises, responsible AI lives or dies in the gap between strategy decks and what actually ships. The WEF “Advancing Responsible AI Innovation” playbook gives a useful language for that gap - but it only becomes real when it’s translated into operating habits across product, risk, and technology teams. Here I want to spend some time thinking about how the nine plays in the framework can be used as a practical scaffold for enterprise AI programmes, rather than a poster on the wall....
Last week we received the worst possible task - we got nursery homework for our 2-year-old. Could we, please, prepare some photos from holidays and send them over1. Now, this could have been worse. They just wanted a number of photos that we could email over with some explanation. In the past this has included printing and sticking too - something that took far longer than we had anticipated. We started this by grabbing a few photos from Google Photos and downloading them....
I started using emacs in 2020 after reading a long-lost article about using org-mode as a blogging platform. It hit at the right time as I was looking for a tool that enabled auto-generated, centralised, todo lists - something that was surprisingly difficult to do at the time.1 I have written quite a bit in the last five year, including a peer reviewed journal article and use Emacs every day in my corporate job, both during my science days but also since my move to IT....
I am a big fan of building tools for your workflows. Here is another quick example. To create these blog posts I need to create a markdown file with some front matter. An example of this is below - indeed this is the front matter for this post. --- author: Timothy Johnson title: Emacs - Quick Blog Function date: 2025-05-27 draft: False featured_image: "" tags: ["Emacs", "personal", "tech"] --- Each time I write a blog I need to do this, I hate duplication of work!...
Learn the tool once, benefit for a decade. That’s compound interest for your career. If you’re committed to long-term projects—whether it’s a PhD, a book, or building your career—then mastering the right tools and workflows isn’t optional. It’s foundational. A John Kitchin quote that’s stuck with me for nearly a decade captures this perfectly: Scientific publishing is a career-long activity, and one should not shy away from learning a tool that can have an impact over this time scale....
Very quick one today. Recently I’ve started to feel the need to build out some predefined window pane layouts within emacs. This started when I realised I was spending quite a bit of time flipping between various windows while I was under utilising screen space. Double this with some (forced) time spent in a VSCode for work and seeing what an advantage having a file tree, main code window and terminal would be - even when just playing with text....