matthes
Bio
Participation1
Talk to me about your thoughts on how to best study wild animals and their welfare at scale!
I live in Sheffield where I work as an engineer on cool stuff to improve the world. Most of my time has been on a pandemic preparedness project, but recently started some shrimp welfare work that I am excited about.
I recently restarted EA Sheffield as a city group. Come along to our next social if you're in the area! I organised EA North 2025 and might make it an annual thing.
I have a PhD in computer science and an undergrad degree in physics. For my PhD thesis I co-developed an open source, low-power, low-cost location data logger to help biologists study wild animals.
How others can help me
Talk to me about tech bottlenecks for studying and improving the welfare of animals (farmed and wild) at scale.
How I can help others
I have some experience in building hardware (CAD, PCB design, ..) and writing code for various applications. I also have what is left from an undergraduate degree worth of physics knowledge (anything from mechanics to basic quantum field theory).
Posts 25
Comments10
Thanks! Some reasons I chose GitHub Discussions:
- threads stay up and visible forever for free (Slack is almost $10 per user and month if you want to keep post history beyond 90 days)
- there is an upvote feature making browsing more interesting because you can sort posts (once there is lots of content)
- people can close discussions when their post is resolved which declutters the default main page (for simple question + answer posts)
- no user management necessary
- if I made a Slack joining link public I open the doors to bots - GitHub is natively pretty great at spam/bot prevention (at least so far)
- if I made a Slack joining link private I would have to spend some of my time going through applications
- anyone can easily check it out without having to set anything up
- everything related to High Impact Engineers is on GitHub, making it easy to onboard new contributors/maintainers/admins which is great for a volunteer-run org
- many engineers have a GitHub account already and are familiar with the interface
Slack seems expensive and/or more appropriate for real-time conversation.
I do appreciate that this is a bit unusual, but it seems like the perfect platform to me!
Thanks! I actually quite like a minimalist website for now. I wanted it to be free and future proof, so I went with a simple open source Jekyll theme as the base. Here is the source code if anyone wants to clone the EA Sheffield website: https://github.com/EA-Sheffield/EA-Sheffield.github.io
I might buy a custom domain at some point, but I am not sure it's worth the money.
For now, the focus of EA Sheffield is mostly to just offer community and support for people who are already into EA, rather than market and grow it. But maybe I'll get back to you on that if I have more bandwidth for this in the future! Amplify sounds interesting - good luck with it!
It doesn't feel particularly different from other academic conferences to me. Most researchers don't reflect on what they think the most important research is and then go out and find the funding and institution to do exactly that. Instead, you usually apply to lots of PhD/postdoc positions that are vaguely in your field of expertise and you take what you get. Such positions often come with funding for some particular kind of work. I am not surprised that there is money in research on precision livestock farming, for example. I expect this is a bit different once you get tenure, but most research is done by early-career researchers (because there are so much more of them).
I assume the people there like animals a bit more than the average person. They probably chose their undergrad (veterinary science/biology/...) because of that. Then, at the end of their undergrad they would have chosen their final project from a limited list of possible projects offered by a limited number of labs (at a uni that they picked years previously for probably different reasons). And then, when they were applying to PhDs, they likely prioritised projects that were somewhat related to that undergrad project. Sadly, a lot of researchers stumble into their speciality like that.
(This is my personal impression of how academia works. I am not aware of any proper research on this.)
Thanks for the feedback! Maybe I overestimate how common GitHub use is.
Having said that, GitHub Discussions as a forum space requires no knowledge of git or coding. I think the interface is even simpler than the EA forum.
Contributing to the website is definitely going to be more accessible to people with some software experience. Although I am totally willing to onboard people with no prior experience if they're excited to learn!
I'll look into making the contribution guidelines on the website sound more welcoming.