Back to articles

Hi and welcome to my new blog! I’m Nicolas, a French expat currently living near Amsterdam where I spent the past 4 years completing a PhD in Theoretical physics. By the end of the program, I realized that, while my time as a physicist had possibly been the most enriching experience of my life, maybe it was time to move on towards a different path. This is how my new journey in the world of data science, AI and machine learning started. As I am writing this, I am impatiently waiting to embark on a new job as a junior Data Scientist.

Why did I build a blog?

I first built this website as a profile and portfolio page when applying for jobs, trying to showcase my skills through various personal projects. Before long, I was thinking it would be neat to add a blog section. Part of my motivations was also to rekindle with web development, my first computer-based hobby which I started learning when I was 13. I have to say I was really impressed by the current state of affairs. Back when I started, Bootstrap was at its infancy and the hot-topic backend framework was Django. I still remember fondly the early days of Node.js which I spent desperately trying to decipher its documentation so I would never have to write PHP again. Now, fast-forward to 15 years later, it’s the dominant backend technology and paired with the React library and some good CSS framework, designing elegant websites has never been this simple!

So I started with the excellent Astro framework and used the very extensive Tailwind CSS framework to build the website of my dreams. I chose Astro because I really wanted the content of the posts to be in a simple format while keeping the minimalism of a static website. The ability to simply parse Mardown files immediately convinced me. As I was just finishing this project, I found this interesting discussion regarding Tailwind and how it compares to the more minimalist Pico CSS (and more generally CSS frameworks based on sane defaults for native HTML tags). Had I found this sooner, I think I wouldn’t have used Tailwind which I found overkill for my needs, but I am overall happy with the learning experience.

What should you expect from this blog?

When I was an academic, writing was a big part of my job, but it was not necessarily the one I enjoyed most. Writing technical academic articles is not always a pleasant experience (although I always admired those who seemed to find some joy to it), it can be tedious and you usually end up arguing semantics with reviewers and co-authors. However, it was always a great way to really think about whatever project I had just completed. I found that only by putting myself in the shoes of my would-be readers did I truly understand what I had researched (and hopefully found). Now that research is not my day-job anymore, I thought that I needed another way to process what I learn, what I work on and more generally what I find interesting, and so I decided to write blog posts about it. Some will be about interesting physics papers I read or some cool math fact I figure out. Others will be about my learning journey in data science and what I think I can share about it. Finally some will probably just be an elaborate excuse to spend some time on some new tool I really want to try. I actually have a large backlog of cool python libraries to try, and I have a few projects already I would like to write about, so stay tuned for that.

Let me close this little introduction by mentioning that I have never been a big fan of social networks (especially as a participant, I do enjoy lurking) so if you want to be updated of new posts, I suggest to do so through the RSS feed !