For the three-minute version, have a read of this thesis comic.

During my thesis, I’d found that sensitivity analysis was something that a lot of researchers talked about but rarely explained. I found it to be a really useful technique, and so I wrote a paper that attempted to distill the basics.

Another focus of the thesis was an open-source software library wrapper around an existing software simulation package, OpenDSS. This library makes it much simpler to run experiments on electrical networks, because they’re able to be analysed using a semi-sensible API instead of the weird script-style things that software simulators often end up using. The abstraction is by no means perfect, but I think it’s a pretty good improvement upon what was previously available. It was also my first real experiment into API design, and how I learned that good API design is really hard.

See also