Burnt Fen Creative

This year, Alan Rubin and I helped organize and co-edit the PyConAU 2026 Academic Proceedings.

My late night habit of reading open access papers published in Zootaxa continues to provide some interesting small papers.

Today I facilitated the Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington PGSA Special General Meeting, where we adopted a new constitution, elected some new executive committee members, and said thanks to those who were rolling off of the committee - inc…

After the last Wikicon Aotearoa in Ōtautahi Christchurch in May, 2025, I made the decision to change the license on all of my iNaturalist photos to enable easy reuse for Wikipedia and elsewhere.

I arrived in Wellington with fresh eyes and a spring in my step, back in 2024.

TAXACOM is a mailing list that started some time in the forever ago, and ran until it was suddenly cut off at the end of 2025.

Last year, I was on the organizing committee for Kiwi PyCon, the main Python conference held in New Zealand.

On October 16th, I was voted in as a Fellow of the Linnean Society.

I recently had the immense joy of visiting Burnt Fen.

The PGSA is a student association for PhD, Masters, and other postgrad students at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington.

I keep a list of all of my publications in a few places - on my CV, on ORCID, on Google Scholar, and on this site.

In early September, I published a new paper on ornithological nomenclature.

There’s a wonderful Calvin and Hobbes strip – almost certainly my favourite – where Hobbes comes upon Calvin, hands down in the creek, and asks him what he is up to.

Last month, I was lucky enough to be announced as one of two recipients of the PhD scholarships from the Royal Society Te Apārangi Wellington Branch.

Yesterday I gave a talk at the 2025 IEEE New Zealand Central Section Postgraduate Symposium, about the preprint which I and many other coathors published: 10 quick tips for making your software outlive your job.

Nomad as Fuck is a project I ran, highlighting awesome nomads and talking about some of their stories.

A couple of years ago, I was reading about differentiating subspecies of swans when I came across a paper that used a term that made me stop and stare.

I often need to grab the title of a web page.

ICZN Case 12162: Designation of a neoneotype Borg, Carreras, Liberstein, Arno-Hunderra, and Kitchen (2034) have been widely lauded as the geneticists behind the de-extinction of Palaeoloxodon falconeri (Busk, 1867).

New publication post!

This week, my first paper on zoological nomenclature was published.

I want to share stuff, and I don’t think I can easily, because of how publishing works.

In my last post, I talked about applying for an ISSN.

Today I’ve applied for this blog to have an ISSN, so that I can fix issues in Latin names for animals more easily.

As of last night at the AGM, I am now a new Committee Member for PythonNZ.

I am the eBird reviewer for St.

I’ve started a new podcast, focusing on open source and the climate crisis.

A couple of days ago, I wanted a way to open my daily note in Obsidian for tomorrow, the day before.

I have added a few items to my publications list recently, and I wanted to add them here, too.

The best place to reach me is undoubtedly Signal or email.

The majority of my coding these days appears to be based around birds.

One of the books that I’ve read recently which has furthered and deepened my appreciation for the natural world is Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac.

I haven’t used this blog in a while, but I want to do so again, for a couple of reasons: I don’t like the old journal system I had set up.