Hello, I'm Julia.

Before I ever wrote a line of code or ran a Monte Carlo simulation, I was in insurance and finance, crunching numbers, sitting in meetings, making phone calls, meeting clients. It was fine. It just wasn't quite right.

In 2017, at 33 and with a toddler on my hip, I swapped spreadsheets and emails for Schrödinger's equation. More accurately, Maxwell's equations, but you get the idea.

Confidence comes slowly. Seven years after starting this journey, I finally earned my MSc. Impostor syndrome still knocks on the door, but I remind myself: if I've come this far, it was earned.

For years I hesitated to put my thoughts out there. I doubted whether I had anything worthwhile to share. Now, over a year into my PhD, I can feel myself growing into this role, and this site is part of that.

These days I simulate magnetic nanoparticle assemblies using high-performance computing. I'm interested in spin glass physics: systems where particles interact in frustrated, disordered ways that produce surprisingly rich behaviour.

My main tool is SpinGlassLab, a Julia package I'm building for my PhD that runs Monte Carlo simulations using custom CUDA kernels. When a study needs thousands of runs to gather statistics, every millisecond matters.

Alongside the science, I've started doing more dev work on the side. AI assistance has made it realistic to ship things I'd never have had time to learn during a PhD before: small tools that smooth over my own research workflow, packages that solve a specific problem and might help someone else, the occasional weekend utility. They scratch a real itch in the PhD, and quietly build out a CV and portfolio at the same time. Call it futureproofing.

This site is where I share what I learn along the way: Linux workflows, simulation work, research reflections, and the honest version of the journey rather than the highlight reel.

The way I work has changed quickly in the past year. Even GPU programming isn't what it was when I was writing CUDA kernels by hand. These days I direct more than I type, which leaves more time to go deeper into the physics and let that knowledge steer the code. The notes here track that shift as it happens.

Sharing what I've learned feels right. Maybe a tip here saves you an afternoon of debugging. Maybe a story there sparks someone's next idea. Science only matters when we pass it on. If any of that resonates, welcome.