Blogging everyday

It is popular wisdom that if you want to do something good, you have to do it daily. I suppose it applies to academic writing as well. Now, I am still at the gate of academia but I do get to write. I am currently authoring a paper with Prof Meghna Agarwala on Determinants of Crop Residue Burning (more about the paper in coming Blogs) and assisting Prof Aparajit Dasgupta with her paper. This blog is an effort in the direction of making my writing more precise.

There were several options to go on with. I could have started a Blogger website or WordPress. They are simple and the required fixed cost is low and they get the things done. Also, I would not have had to go through several steps with the method I am following, setting up a Git Hosted website. But you see, they are simple for a reason. I do not suppose there is an easier way to write a blog post via your terminal if not hosted on Git. Everything on this website, right from the setting up of the website to this particular post is being done via a terminal. Not a single mouse click, not a single tab opened. Before you judge it for being overkill, let me offer my rationale. I value knowing the process, especially wherever my data and my work are involved. This whole post was written in a simple text editor, with no frills attached. No worries about the alignment being off or anything like that, the template takes care of all that. All the past, present, and future posts are going to be consistent, aesthetically of course. Also, the whole document is just a plain document. It is going to be machine-readable as long as there are computers. Not being locked into a proprietary format anymore (looking at you .dta files). What else? Well, I have the whole website including every post (live or draft) living on the hard drive. I can migrate it easily to any service including the aforementioned.

There is yet another reason for going through this ordeal. Though this whole technical stuffs seems kind of unrelated to academic research at first, I think it goes a little deeper. I do not know how things were in academia some times ago but things are (have) chang(ed)ing now. Working with data though uses economic reasoning but there are several aspects of it that do not look academic at all. Conflicts with the packages are not uncommon while running a regression. Ensuring the reproducibility of the work takes the non-academic part to yet another level. An economist has to be comfortable with technical stuff. The point I am trying to make is, we already are a lot technical without even realizing it. When it comes to making a blog post, that level of comfort should be reflected in it as well. Also, a consistent work philosophy if it makes our work clear is always a good idea.

Oops! I totally forgot to write about academic writing. Maybe in the next post.

Alright! time to git push . this post.