I’ve wanted a low-ceremony place to write things down for a while. Papers are not really the right place for most of it: they take a long time to write, have to tell a fairly clean story, and mostly leave out all the things that did not work along the way. Talks are a bit better, but then they disappear. So I figured I would try notes.

I expect to write mostly about three things.

Academia. Things I wish someone had explained to me earlier: reviewing, advising, choosing research problems, what I look for in prospective students, and things I have changed my mind about.

Papers. Reactions to papers I find interesting. Probably not reviews or summaries, but more often one idea that stuck with me, something I learned from the paper, or occasionally something I think is being misunderstood when people cite it.

Experiments. Internet measurement produces a lot of things that are interesting without quite becoming papers: negative results, weird artifacts, half-baked ideas, and experiments that took a week only to tell me that the idea was wrong. I’d like somewhere to put those too.

I don’t have a schedule in mind, and I don’t know how long these will be. I’ll write something when I have something worth writing down. There’s an RSS feed if you want to follow along.