In an hommage to Jerry and George, I’m shamelessly borrowing the idea of creating content about nothing. So, in this first post, I present to you the GDTk blog: a blog about nothing.
It’s not entirely true that this blog is about “nothing”, but I’m borrowing that word in the same sense George used it, “no plot, no stories!”. In our case, this blog has no real agenda. Despite that, I hope you find it immensely interesting.
If you are little confused about who Jerry and George are at this stage, you need to acquaint yourself with the sitcom Seinfeld immediately, particularly the episode “The Pitch”.
Let me tell you the why of this blog from my perspective. In my academic job, everything I publish in the literature requires a very sound evidence base. This is important in scholarly output when attempting to extend humanity’s knowledge. However, the timescale for sharing that knowledge is slow. There are times I would like to connect to the users and developers of the GDTk project in an informal manner, in a manner that is direct, timely, spontaneous, but longer than 280 characters. There are times I would like to share my opinion, you know, get on my soapbox in this ephemeral patch of human discourse ie. the internet. I’ll try to keep my opinion to things I feel I know a reasonable amount about such as CFD developments that have sparked my interest; programming languages and software development practice; computer architectures for high-performance computing; and — my favourite — gases that move at supersonic speeds. I guess some would call that informed opinion. I also want to use this blog to share new developments in the code collection, some tips on doing simulations, and some of the behind-the-scenes efforts. In short, a lot of what will appear here is basically my opinion on things that matter to me or interest me at a certain moment in time.
So with my weasel words in place, let me now me speak for others on the team. My hope for this blog is to get contributions from the developers, the users, and some guests of the project. I want this to be a platform for connection amongst the users and developers. This blog is not like BTS on the stage playing to the stadium, but rather, everyone getting up for a go at karaoke, à la Ben’s Restaurant.
For a blog post about nothing, this has already gone on for a bit. If you feel this post said nothing, then it has fulfilled its ontological purpose. However, if you’re ready for some more raw and unfiltered opinion on things related to computational gas dynamics, then read on! Next up is a great example of sharing our opinion: have a read of PJ’s blog post to the D programming community on why we like to use D as our weapon of choice for the core code in GDTk.