Your UMAP Doesn’t Look Good

Sorry, but it doesn’t! But that’s OK, you just work in an industry that prioritizes quick results over aesthetics. The default UMAP plots from scanpy and Seurat are certainly serviceable, but no matter what journal you publish in, you deserve to have a clean-looking plot that more effectively communicates your data!

I know lots of people spend their whole lives perfecting data visualizations. I am not one of those people, I am just an opinionated researcher with a bit too much time on my hands.

Building a RAG Application so I Know What a RAG Application Is

I like staying on top of current tech trends, and one thing that is very popular right now is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications. That sounds intimidating, but in trying to build one I found, like most tech hype, that they are simultaneously very cool and very boring. Here I’ll describe my motivation, implementation, and future plans for a small RAG application I call LabLedger.

I love listening to concerts, but it’s often tough to find bands playing in time to buy tickets, let alone decide if I think it’s worth it to spend my time and money to go and support new artists. So I built TWiM, a tool that finds concerts and builds playlists for them automatically. Fortunately for me, there are plenty of city-specific websites that have info on upcoming concerts! My idea was simple: write a program that would load the artists for the next week and make a Spotify playlist using spotipy. Easy enough, right?

Why Revive A Website 4 Years Later?

I’ve had a website for a while, about 2021ish. It was an “I’m bored” pandemic project meant to showcase my work. I always wanted a website, but making one still requires deciding on a framework, getting a theme that fits you, and then debugging all of the tiny little problems. Overall, it’s not hard but it’s not exactly common. More and more I’m convinced that personal websites need to make a comeback. Here’s a few thoughts on why I’m devoting more time to writing posts on my personal website.