Now that I can move my neck properly again it’s time to have a look back on my Microbial Advent Calendar attempt. The exercise was to produce a small blog post a day, for 24 days, about a cool microbiology fact/paper related anywhere from close to pretty far from the Christmas topic.
With 17 out of 24 blog posts in December, I have a look back on how to improve this if I want to redo it next year.
The Good...
- Read at least one paper a day
- Important habit to get into for staying in touch with the science world
- Small science-related writing every day
- Never stop writing
- One illustration every day
- My way to partially stay sane in Academia
- Improved knowledge
- I got to discover a lot of cold-related microbiology
- Having a small collection of premade bacteria drawings helped a lot
- I will probably redo some stickers of them
- Bacteria are an important process of cocoa production!
- Seriously…
- Kept the blog alive
... and the Improvable
Most of the improvement would be related on how to improve the length of writing a post a day:
- Start preparing a list before the 1st of December
- Days where I already had a paper lined out where considerably faster to produce than others
- Don’t get sidetracked by awesome datasets
- I didn’t really needed to have an animated map of the progression of the London Plague of 1664.
- I refrained from making a similar analysis of the chocolate production worldwide since 1962
- Find a middle point on how to discuss a paper
- Don’t really have time to properly get into what bothered me in some of the papers I presented
- Manage my back/neck better
- Take care of yourself…
All in all, I really liked doing this, even if it can be a little bit overwhelming when not prepared correctly. I hope you liked this illustrated attempt as much as I did making it and I would like to thank you for passing by and reading my daily ramblings.
I will keep doing small posts about papers I find interresting, although the publishing frequency might be a little bit slower.