- How do I build this site
- I like speed so I use Hugo and a modified version of the Ezhil theme. A lot of cool guys are using the Academic theme, but I don’t like to do like everyone (the same applies when using default Beamer templates), and it doesn’t look that pretty, IMHO. Previously, I was editing the site using custom handcrafted HTML files. That was painful but I kept everything under control. Sometimes I even respected the established standards. Now this is all about HTML5, CSS3, SASS, FontAwesome, etc. I am getting older and I have less time to play with new technologies. This is it. The old site is dead. Long live the new site!
- What editor do I use
- I’m using Neovim for all things related to text editing. I’ve been using Doom Emacs for two years or so. Previously I tried Spacemacs, after like 15 years using Vanilla Emacs. I’ve tried other text editors in the past but I was always missing some of Emacs or Vim functionalities. Textmate was so great, but it doesn’t run in a Terminal and is Mac only. I choose Emacs over Vi long ago, and I was happy with that until I realized how nice Vim is. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not about being part of the evil vs. God proponents war. I don’t have a religion (even if you bring me some data). I used to use Vim over ssh or for small offhand editing tasks. Lately I realized I could handle all things I was doing with Emacs with Neovim, without having to break my config every two weeks because of package updates and broken dependencies in Doom or other starter kits. Of course, I could rewrite my Emacs config from scratch, but I am lazy nowadays. Let’s go full-time Neovim for now.
- What software do I use
- Over the years, I have installed and used (or forget to use) many Mac apps until I realized that some were just not matching the way I work. No need to try again and again. Everyone has his own GTD—whether it works or not is another matter—and there is simply no point trying to do like the others. I’ve been using Macbooks during 15 years. Lately, I tended to stick with few apps on my 12″ Macbook, and I provided some review of various apps I may have used from time to time. Many of those fancy apps were uninstalled at some point, as I realized that nothing was going to replace my Terminal and command-line utilities. Recently, I switched to Ubuntu and I no longer use macOS for my daily job. I also used OpenBSD from time to time. In both cases, the usual suspects are the same: Neovim, Tmux and Zsh, as the basis of all of my workflows, additional TUIs for reading mail (neomutt), reading news (newsboat), listening to music (cmus or mpv), or chatting on Libera.chat (irssi). I’m definitely back to the future.
- Why open source and closed software
- I spent almost 15 years using the R statistical package, although I also happen to use Stata or Mathematica. Is it worth a debate? I like open source software and I use a lot of them on a daily basis, but I may also buy good software if they do the job and I feel comfortable using them. If you swear by R, please take a(nother) look at Stata documentation. If you say there is nothing better than running SymPy in a Jupyter notebook, try Mathematica.
- What is my preferred programming language
- I like C (well, that was years ago!), Common Lisp and Scheme dialects, and sometimes Python. These days, I am mostly diving into Racket, Haskell, Clojure, and I use shell scripting, SQL and Python at work. Usually, being able (1) to fire an REPL for quick scripting, (2) to use efficient data structures and/or FFI and (3) to rely on good visualization backends are a plus. After all, this is usually what we expect for statistical computing and data science. Above all, I make heavy use of a terminal (previously, iTerm2 and Fish; next, kitty and zsh; now, Tmux in a Gnome Terminal and zsh) and text-oriented tools (sed/awk, GNU coreutils).
- Where do I find all those informations on the www
- I used to consult my Twitter account two or three times a day, and I spent a lot of time on Cross Validated for several years. I’m all done by now and my relation with internet is close to nil, except perhaps for brief chat session on IRC and regular checks of my RSS feeds. I also read some articles on arXiv; I still follow some cool and bright people on the internet, especially their blog or GitHub accounts. See if you find something interesting to read from my OPML file. Want some names? Here we go (in no particular order): Evan Miller, Tom MacWright, John D Cook, Atabey Kaygun, John Myles White, Darren Wilkinson, Dirk Eddelbuetel, Peter Ellis, Jan de Leeuw, Frank Harrell, Will Lowe, Seth Brown, Ben Klemens, Mike Bostock, Radford Neal, Jeffrey M Heer, Peter Norvig, Allen Downey, Jack Baty, Brett Terpstra, Eli Bendersky, BSAG, Steve Losh, Robert Smith. And, of course, a big thanks to Christophe Pallier!
- Is there a photo of me somewhere
- N/A (not anymore). Unless you’re looking for my Gravatar, which actually is an old drawing of my son when he was 4 years old.
