Internship Journal on Luis’ Corner

Week 13: Software engineering in scientific projects

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:53:36 -0500

Note: Week 13 covers April 13 through 19 of 2026

On the data science project

Defining dependencies aka software engineering

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m working on the side on a computer vision project. The previous work was more of a proof-of-concept, rather than a complete software solution. As such, I, who happen to know a thing or two about software engineering, thought it best to start by adding the explicit list of dependencies needed to run the project. Since I’m bored of always using the pip package manager, with the usual requirements.txt file, I opted instead for the hot stuff: the uv package manager.

Week 12: Ramsey theory, Crane et al.’s heat method

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:25:14 -0500

Note: Week 12 covers April 6 through 12 of 2026

Ramsey theory

A few months ago, I watched N Is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős, a documentary on late Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős. During a discussion of the party puzzle and Ramsey theory, an article co-authored by Ronald L. Graham came up. I figured they were referring to this July 1990 Scientific American Magazine article¹. I hadn’t read it in its entirety, even though I downloaded it in October/November 2025.

Week 10: Circling back

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:24:36 -0500

Note: Week 10 covers March 23 through 29 of 2026

Image segmentation

I’m working on a side project related to the problem of image segmentation. There’s a working implementation of OpenCV subroutines that manages a decent result, but we’re looking into ways to improve it. Besides computer vision, I will have to deepen my knowledge of statistics, as we plan on comparing the real distribution of the objects, measured with a callipers, with the computed one.

Week 9: An image journal

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:21:41 -0500

Nature

The Medellín skyline during a sunset, as seen from El Poblado. Shared by my friend Jerónimo Acosta.

A butterfly I found near the fourth entrance to campus. One of its wings was broken. We kept it for a while, but soon let it go…

Week 7: Migrating to Hugo and playing guitar

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Migrating this blog from Bear Blog to Hugo

Why?

I sticked with Bear from the start as I wasn’t planning on doing anything “fancy” with the blog. Now that I’ve thought of adding images for a while, I think it’s time to use a static website generator, such as Hugo, to serve my own content using e.g. GitHub Pages.

Bear costs US$3 per month (after adjusting for Purchasing Power Parity), but it was still not worth it for me, a programmer anyway.

Week 6: Lunch with a mathematician, English, and nature

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 07:15:00 -0500

Lunch with professor María Amelia Salazar

Having lunch at the same time every day can make you loss opportunities to run into people you don’t usually run into. This time, I ran into professor María Amelia Salazar.

A Doctor in Mathematics from Ultrecht University, she used to teach at the Brazilian university Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As per her website (linked above), her main research interests are “Lie groupoids, Lie algebroids, Lie pseudogroups, geometry of PDE’s, Poisson geometry, contact and symplectic geometry.”

Week 5: Public libraries, screensavers, and a meeting

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the public libraries map

I made some progress towards my goal of drawing a Voronoi diagram of the nearest public libraries in Medellín. I’m using GeoPandas with Matplotlib and Contextily.

The tiles turned out to be problematic. Contextily just won’t finish at all when I pass the polygon of the Voronoi diagram. It might be the case that it’s trying to download a lot of tiles.

Cellular Automata Screensaver

Since I’m reading this book by Michael Batty on cellular automatas applied to cities, I downloaded a Celullar Automata Screensaver for my Windows laptop:

Week 4: Voronoi, stochastic L-systems, set theory

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Trying, and miserably failing, to create that plot

But you know that when the truth is told

That you can get what you want or you can just get old

–Billy Joel, “Vienna”

As I mentioned in the previous entry, I was eager to try my hand at OSMnx plotting to draw a map of the city in a Voronoi diagram sort-of-way… but I failed. You see, I searched for previous work — a.k.a. someone who’s dunnit already — and I found Sabrina Chan’s 2019 blog post. It was quite alright, though it seemed to use Python 2 (instead of Python 3, released in 2008), and wasn’t as plug-and-play as I would have expected. In the end, I tried to tweak their Jupyter Notebook to do the exact same thing for my use case, but it was quite hard. Tomorrow, if I feel like it, I might give it another go. If not, maybe next time around.

Week 3: New office, lo-fi, papers, and a general meeting

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500

First week in the new office

It seems like it’s been ages since we last worked on the fifth floor of the Engineering Building. I worked there for less than a month, but I was already getting used to the fake wood, the orange atmosphere, the constant strolling about for coffee (not me, as I don’t drink coffee). Not to mention the occasional weird conversations on the other side of the court.

Week 2: Gathering steam

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 10:18:00 -0500

Contracting a contract

We had a few hiccups regarding the official starting date of my contract. An earlier document had set the starting date as the 15th of January. As I mentioned in the previous entry, I dutifully showed up. The Admissions Office wasn’t exactly pleased with my not-having-a-contract-yet-still-showing-up shtick.

Guitar classes

I signed up for guitar classes. We’re starting on Tuesday the 10th of February. Here’s their syllabus from the course page:

Week 1: Starting my internship

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

Read the About page for context regarding this blog.

First day, sort of

My contract was supposed to start on the 15th of January. That morning, I dutifully packed my laptop and headed to the 6th floor of the Engineering Building.