Research and product development are usually presented as sequential: you study something, then you build something. In practice, at least in my experience, they run in parallel and frequently interfere with each other in ways that are neither clean nor comfortable.
Research & Building is a series about what happens at that boundary. It documents the experience of doing graduate research in ecological niche modelling of foot-and-mouth disease under climate change while simultaneously building and shipping commercial software. Sometimes those two things reinforce each other. Often they compete for the same hours, the same cognitive load, and the same intellectual energy.
The series covers questions I haven't found well-answered elsewhere:
- How do you maintain research rigour when a client deadline is three days away?
- What does it mean to treat your own infrastructure as a research instrument?
- When does a paper become a positioning document, and is that a problem?
- How do you read academic literature as a practitioner without losing the parts that actually matter for building things?
- What does the practitioner-researcher split cost you - and what does it give you that neither role has alone?
Some pieces are reading notes from books and papers that shaped how I think. Others are field reports from the overlap: moments where a statistical model informed an architectural decision, or a production failure reframed a research question. A few will be honest accounts of getting both wrong at once.
This is not a series about work-life balance or productivity systems. It's about what it actually looks like to operate across two disciplines that rarely acknowledge each other - and what becomes possible when they do.
If you're a researcher who builds things, or an engineer who reads papers and wonders whether they're allowed to, these notes are for you. Nobody warned us the overlap would be this loud.