It’s time to start a new term on #themorningpaper. I read my very first #themorningpaper on the 30th July 2014 (“Why functional programming matters”, Hughes 1990) and since then, bar three scheduled breaks a year, I’ve been reading a research paper every weekday. Since the 8th October 2014, I’ve also been posting a write-up of the day’s paper on The Morning Paper blog. There’s not always an exact 1:1 correspondence between a post and a paper, but it’s pretty good. On that basis, you can now find somewhere in the order of 840 paper write-ups on the blog, and we’re racing towards the 1,000 mark!
People often ask, and yes, it’s a lot of work to curate papers, read them, and post the write-ups! Somewhere on the order of 15-20 hours a week (and all outside of my regular work commitments). I’ve got a tremendous amount of value out of this habit and I intend to keep it going. However, starting again this term it suddenly felt like a big load to carry – might be something to do with the fact that we’re moving house in a couple of weeks! So to keep things feeling fun for me and avoid it turning into a chore, I’m giving myself permission not to post a paper every single weekday. That puts a little more flexibility into my schedule on busy weeks, and makes space for a few more fitness-related activities as well (feeding your mind, but neglecting your health and fitness isn’t smart!). Some weeks there’ll still be one paper a day, some weeks there might only be one, I expect I’ll settle somewhere around 3 papers a week for the time being. (That feels like a light load after 4 years of doing 5!). Every paper will still go out to this blog, the mailing list, and to twitter so if you follow one of those sources, you won’t miss anything.
Some of you may be saying “thank goodness, now I’ll have more of a chance of keeping up!”. For a select few readers, I know you’ve developed a habit of reading The Morning Paper every day, incorporated into your routines somewhere. Unless you’ve been following along since day 1, there are hundreds of paper write-ups in the archives that can help to fill in the gaps. Another great thing to do would be to use that time to branch out on your own a little – follow up on one or two threads from things that have sparked your interest in The Morning Paper and hopefully discover some great new papers and research that way too. (But be warned, it can be addictive!). If you find something you really enjoy let me know – I’m always on the look out for great papers to cover.
“A Computer Science research paper most weekdays” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “a Computer Science research paper every weekday,” but keeping things sustainable hopefully means we can keep this thing going for many years to come!
And yes, I’ve got paper write-ups scheduled for every day the rest of this week ;).