2025-05-04 Weekly Notes
04 May 2025
Last week started off with a Docker Workshop by the Accelerate Programme for Scientific Discovery (APSCI). This was the only workshop run by them that I hadn’t attended yet and I was really looking forward to it as my experience with Docker had been really limited and didn’t understand very well how to implement it in my workflow. I would highly recommend the other workshops by them, especially the packaging and publishing one for scientific software.
I also wrote the documentation for the Python package I’ve been building for the Estates department, for which I used MKDocs (which I learned in one of APSCI’s workshops). I hadn’t used it before and it is so easy to set up and publish in GitHub Pages. I would recommend it alongside the material theme and the mkdocs-jupyter libraries to integrate jupyter notebooks straight in the website (see any of Qiusheng Wu’s famous package websites in the geospatial community for reference). By learning this, I also accidentally came across CI/CD concepts and managed to setup a GitHub workflow for MKDocs, and found how to set up one for my Quarto website (to be realeased at some point in June).
I also had an interesting conversation with Anil and one of his MPhil students about walkability maps with my data and OSM. We will keep working on it in these next weeks.
The highlight of the week was attending the AI for Nature & Climate meeting at DAB with bunch of experts from both the domain and technical side, with many familiar faces from around Cambridge. It was a great opportunity to hear about other people’s work and do a bit of networking.
Finally, I finished reading Good Nature by Professor Kathy Willis from Oxford. Quite a good literature review of all the benefits of having nature around you, whether indoors or outdoors. The book is divided into chapters explaining the positive effects of nature on the different senses, and it seems that the most impacted is actually the smell, despite the fact that most research is focused on the visual aspect. Another interesting thing I found in the book is how human microbiome changes with plants around, which begs the question if people at DAB have a distinct bacteria fingerprint to the rest of the city due to the giant green wall in the building.🤔 Overall, I will be using many of the references in the book for my literature review because they are very relevant for my project. My next read is going to be the Nature of Our Cities by Nadina Galle.