Blog

2023-07-31

Today is my last day working at the University of Liverpool and my last week living in the UK. It’s been a busy, interesting, exciting, and life-changing experience. I’ll always be glad that I came and immensely grateful to all of my colleagues and friends for welcoming me and my family and...

2023-07-27

This blog post was first published on the Software Sustainability Institute’s blog on 29 May 2023 under a CC-BY-NC license. It’s republished here under the same license. After moving to the UK in 2019, I found myself missing some of the connections I had made in my previous job with folks that...

2022-12-20

On 27 November 2022, the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawai‘i started erupting for the first time since 1984. The eruption has now ceased and since its start the Landsat 9 satellite has take two multi-spectral images (called scenes) of the volcano, one on 2 December and the other on 10 December. If...

2022-04-28

This tutorial was developed for Transform 2022, the Software Underground’s virtual festival of open Geoscience. Watch the recording on YouTube Run the code online: launch Binder Original source code and instructions: compgeolab/transform2022 Code license: BSD 3-clause Text and figures license:...

2022-03-14

Before the second day of my 4-week “Introduction to Python for Geoscientists” workshop a few weeks ago, I was asked by a student why they needed to learn how to code. After all, they are training to become a geologist, not a geophysicist, and couldn’t see how this would be useful in their future...

2020-01-23

I have been selected as part of the 2020 cohort of Fellows of the Software Sustainability Institute! The Institute cultivates world-class research with software. It’s based at the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Southampton, and Oxford in the UK. Their motto says it all: The SSI has a...

2019-12-08

I have two open positions for funded studentships at the University of Liverpool. Applications are open until 10 January 2020. Project descriptions Follow the links for more detailed versions. Bringing machine learning techniques to geophysical data processing The goal of this project is to...

2018-12-26

TL;DR: Create a conda environment for each project, capture exact versions when possible, automate activation and updating with a bash function. I often work on several different projects involving software: Python libraries, papers, presentations, this website, etc. Each project has different...

2018-09-14

Verde is a Python library for processing spatial data (bathymetry, geophysics surveys, etc) and interpolating it on regular grids (i.e., gridding). It implements Green’s functions based interpolation methods and other data processing routines. The type of gridding implemented in Verde is...

2018-07-26

This is a list of the websites I use to search for academic jobs in the Earth Sciences (geophysics, geology, oceanography, meteorology, etc). They’ve been very useful to me (I found my current position through the CIG mailing list) and I hope that this post can help others who are looking to...

2018-07-20

A friend to fetch your sample data files. Pooch is a Python package that manages downloading data files over HTTP and storing them in a local directory. It is meant to be used by other Python libraries that ship sample data files for use in documentation, workshops, demos, etc. For example, your...

2018-03-25

I started developing the Fatiando a Terra Python library in 2010. Since then, many other open-source Python libraries for geophysics have appeared, each with unique capabilities. In this post, I’ll explore where I think Fatiando fits in this larger ecosystem and how we can better fill our niche....

2018-03-15

At the PINGA lab, we have been experimenting with ways to increase the reproducibility of our research by publishing the git repositories that accompany our papers. You can find them on our GitHub organzation. I’ve synthesized the experience of the last 4 years into a template in the...

2018-03-09

Last year, I posted my podcast playlist in response to a similar post by John Leeman (of Don’t Panic Geocast fame). In a recent episode (maybe episode 158), John asked listeners for an updated list of recommendations. Here are mine. I’ll start with the new additions since last year, then the...

2017-12-05

The AGU Fall Meeting is happening next week in New Orleans, potentially gathering more than 20,000 geoscientists in a single place. Me and Paul will be there to talk about the next version of the Generic Mapping Tools, my work on GMT/Python, and the role of open-source software in the...

2017-07-26

Last week I presented the first working prototype of GMT/Python at Scipy 2017, which is my favorite conference. I got a lot of excellent feedback about the project and will need to make some major changes as a result. Sadly, I wasn’t very good at managing my time during the talk and didn’t get...

2017-05-11

This year, Scipy is using a double-open peer-review system, meaning that both authors and reviewers know each others identities. These are the reviews that we got for our proposal and our replies/comments (posted with permission from the reviewers). My sincerest thanks to all reviewers and...

2017-04-28

Last week, I taught a 3-day Python workshop at the Department of Geology and Geophysics of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where I’m currently doing a postdoc. It covered the basics of computer programming with Python, starting from the very beginning. Below are thoughts and information about...

2017-03-30

This is the proposal for talk that I co-authored with Paul Wessel and submitted to Scipy 2017. Fingers crossed that they’ll accept it! If not, this post can serve as an example of what not to do for next time :) The submission is on the GenericMappingTools/scipy2017 GitHub repository. It covers...

2017-03-29

As you may already know, I’m away on a postdoct writing a Python interface for the Generic Mapping Tools. Recently, I started laying out our goals for the project and some of my design ideas. This all lives on the GenericMappingTools/gmt-python GitHub repository, which is where the code will...

2017-03-02

Back in July of 2016, I applied for a postdoc position to build Python bindings for the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) software with Professor Paul Wessel at the University of Hawaii. The short version is that I got the position, asked for a 1 year leave from UERJ (where I currently work as a...

2017-02-07

I get asked a lot in the Fatiando a Terra mailing list how to do some basic Python and numpy tasks which are not necessarily related to Fatiando. The most common question is some variant of “I have some data in a csv/txt/xyz file and I want to load it into Python”. I think this happens because a...

2017-01-23

TL;DR Install Termux from Google Play, open it and run: apt install clang python python-dev fftw libzmq libzmq-dev freetype freetype-dev libpng libpng-dev pkg-config LDFLAGS=" -lm -lcompiler_rt" pip install numpy matplotlib pandas jupyter jupyter notebook Copy the URL printed to the screen (it...

2017-01-12

Last week, John Leeman wrote a list of podcasts recommendations and I thought I’d share mine here as well. I have been listening to podcasts since around 2014 and I’ve experimented with a few before finding some that I really enjoy. I still subscribe to some new podcasts when I find them. I’ll...