Sabbatical Diary: Weeks 23 & 24

…and with that, the end of the second term¹ of my sabbatical leave. Really getting scarily close to being half-way through. Oh well. Another fortnight of busy-ness with perhaps limited outcomes.

More reviewing, of submissions, papers, and Ph.D. dissertations. The end is in sight though—I think I’m now down to none actually late (to all those TPC Chairs affected—sorry!) and only EuroSys 2027 and EdgeSys 2026 coming up.

Some tweaking of my tool for plotting walk trails with photos used in places on this site, not least to include the occasional video as for, e.g., Bowlees & High Force.

Two good chats about one of the two ideas that I was originally going to pursue while on sabbatical, so that was nice! Plus one good chat with a possible future industrial collaborator on one of the other two ideas that came up post-sabbatical start, so that was also nice!

Finished getting the AI supercomputers up and running and connected properly. And, I believe, Theo has made excellent progress getting the EDGELESS stack up and running on them too so we can demonstrate a really heterogeneous edge-cloud hybrid cluster thing. Also did some of and supported others of the audit-related activity following Roman’s departure and the project’s financial end (final review meeting not for a couple of months yet).

And, perhaps not least, saw a new Chancellor come into being right before my very eyes. With all the trimmings too.