Postdoc at Durham University, built INRFlow analysis framework to optimise datacenter networks using graph theory. Seeking R & D career.

I am writing various bios, About Me pages, and LinkedIn summaries for my upcoming job search and I find it borders on the unbearable sometimes. So instead of using the same boring list of qualities and activities for every one of my bios, I dove in head first. TL;DR:

  1. I did exercises on collecting the raw data and brainstorming that are recommended in various articles and blogs.
  2. I browsed many examples.
  3. I wrote several versions of my Bio.

Before I continue, I want to point out exactly one example. Daniel Lemire is a computer scientist, and he has a great summary, a formal bio, and a “Twitter bio”. Daniel Lemire’s Twitter bio:

Computer science professor at the University of Quebec, contributor to major data-science open-source projects, and long-time blogger.

(4.) I’m about to write ten more bios

I like the idea of a Twitter bio so much that, as an exercise, I will write ten of them (in one sitting). Each one is meant to stand on its own, so some core elements are repeated.

Postdoc at Durham University, author of 14 publications in computer science and math, tatami tilings pioneer, and math entertainer.

Postdoc at Durham University, researching the intersection of datacenters and interconnection networks. Headed for the tech industry.

Postdoc at Durham University, researching datacenters and author of the open-source interconnection network analysis framework INRFlow.

Postdoc at Durham University, contributor to open-source interconnection network analysis framework INRFlow and math entertainer.

Postdoc at Durham University with 14 publications in math and computer science, researching datacenters and graph theory.

Postdoc at Durham University, published in graph theory, computational geometry, combinatorial algorithms, math education, and datacenters.

Up to this point it has been getting easier, but now I’m having trouble thinking of something original.

Postdoc at Durham University with 14 publications in math and computer science, programmer, artist, tinkerer, and father.

Postdoc at Durham University on interconnection (datacenter) networks and INRFlow datacenter flow simulator, artist, tinkerer, and father.

It’s getting quite difficult now! I have to read the previous 8 out loud before continuing.

Postdoc at Durham University using graph theory to optimise datacenter networks, author of 14 publications in math and computer science.

Postdoc at Durham University using graph theory and INRFlow analysis framework to optimise datacenter networks, seeking R & D career.

That’s 10 now, but I want to develop the last one a bit more.

Postdoc at Durham University, built INRFlow analysis framework to optimise datacenter networks using graph theory. Seeking R & D career.

Debrief

The exercise and blog post took me about 1 hour and was well-worth the time. I feel that it helps me to practice writing succinct, concrete things about myself, like ‘researching datacenter networks’, rather than abstract or ambiguous fluff like ‘I am an inventor’. I also realised that I can only target one audience in a tweet, so I wrote a few different single-audience tweets to try things out, and found it useful to sharpen that separation for myself when I write other, longer bios.

How do I do all that character-counting?

I use Vim-mode (aka evil-mode) in my new favourite editor, Spacemacs, and compose the blog post in markdown. The tweets look like this to me:

> Postdoc at Durham University, published in graph theory, computational geometry, combinatorial algorithms, math education, and datacenters.

I write them on one line so that in normal-mode I can press v a s to select a sentence and then SPC x c to count the characters in the selection.