Blog

Compressing global illumination with neural networks

Can neural networks assist in bringing global illumination to the web? Can they also help with adding limited dynamic global illumination? Can they do all that while keeping performance high? Dig in!

Science fiction

“What is happening?”, thought Andrew. It was dark, and reality was fuzzy, pulsating in and out with consciousness. The edges of his bedroom barely perceptible, shifting from ghosts to closets to echoes of palm trees swaying in the wind. “Oh no, no...”

Computing with nature

Years ago I was sitting on the shore watching the waves roll in, invariably and relentlessly crash into the rocks and bounce back towards the open sea in multiple directions, only to soon crash again into the next incoming wave and erupt in a festival of little waves and trapped bubbles of air...

What happens when you type a single letter into an “ordinary” text box

This morning I saw a tweet (a very unofficial one, more like a rumour) about Slack using ProseMirror for its new message box - turns out that’s not the case, as it’s still Quill.js under the hood, but it lead to a short exploration of what modern editors do...

Open source collaborative text editors

For years now I've had this itch, trying to find the "perfect" collaborative text editor. But not just any collaborative text editor, oh no, my speciality is finding (well, at least looking for) open source real-time collaborative web-based rich text editors...

Innovations in scientific publishing

There are awesome things happening and changing around how science is done and communicated, so I thought I'd put them in a list thingy. Let's go!

Can we speed up science with chat?

Combining real-time discussion between researchers with collaborative writing and data analysis, and the ability to publish very granular findings, could result in a major leap in the scale of collaboration and velocity of research...

Why we need a hub for software in science

First let’s take a step back and think about the definition of science: The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment...

Standards for scientific graphic presentation

Over the previous hundred years, a lot of work has gone into standardizing the way scientific data is presented. All of this knowledge has been largely forgotten. I want us to bring it back to life...

Discovery of scientific software

A while back I wrote about an open distributed search engine for science, Scholar Ninja, and about how great it will be to have an open API which you can query and get to all of science, no matter if you’re human or machine. Having the world’s knowledge openly accessible like that...

An open distributed search engine for science

I’ve started building a distributed search engine for scholarly literature, which is completely contained within a browser extension: install it from the Chrome Web Store. It uses WebRTC and magic, and is currently, like, right now, used by 0 people. It’s you who can be number...

Thoughts on reproducibility of open scientific software

Years ago (yes, it’s been years, don’t remind me), I wrote an application for modeling the laser ablation ICP-MS mapping process. This is a thing where you make microscopic...

3 simple things GitHub can do for science

Introduction The topic “GitHub for Science” has been explored quite a few times before (1, 2, 3, 4) and with good reason: it is quite exciting to envision what breakthroughs in...

About me

I’m a medical doctor by education, but I'm not practicing medicine. I finished medical school and shortly after graduation in 2011 I was already on a plane to San Francisco to...

How to send iOS and Android notifications from your Rails backend

Written for a project. I developed the backend for this social wellness mobile app - WellWith.me One of the most common uses for a backend connected to a mobile application is...

#Winning with MapServer, PostGIS and Ruby on Rails

This post was written for a game development project. We were building a real-time strategic running game. TL;DR: We used MapServer, MapCache, PostGIS, PostgreSQL, Open Street...

Students build rocket system

In contrast to my first entry’s futuristic outlook, I intend to return to the reality of now with the following words: “Where can I start building a spaceship?” For some very...

A Case for Spaceships

Who are you? I’m a student, living in Slovenia. I study medicine, but my love is coding and design. That’s all good and well, but where is engineering, you say? Where is math?...