As part of my research training group I am required to give a milestone presentation after my first year of research. This is a platform to present what I have achieved so far, what I might hope to achieve in the next two years and discuss these things with my supervisors. It was scheduled for April 28, but due to the very happy occurrence of another milestone - the birth of my daughter Millie - I was not able to present.

I am now back at work and was able to give my milestone presentation on June 14. It was a good opportunity to focus my attention on the objectives of my work, particularly with the distractions of being a 'freshly baked' parent (as they say here in Germany) as well as the grind of trying to finish my first manuscript.

In the next few months I will be submitting my first manuscript, preparing some extended abstracts for the NZHS conference for which I have been accepted, playing with sediment generators for my next work package, getting ready for a research stay in Waterloo with Martin Ross in the first half of 2017 and, of course, honing my dad skills.

I will be back home in New Zealand in November and December and plan on meeting a few people working in environmental science - there is plenty of space in my diary so get in touch.

Happy new year! Am I still allowed to say that in February?

Presentations have been a running theme in the past few months - I guess they always are in the life of an academic. Elements of my work were presented by Olaf Cirpka at the AGU Fall Meeting in December last year, and he'll also be talking about it at the EGU General Assembly and Computational Methods in Water Resources conference in Toronto in June. I've been working on posters and presentations within our institute, so that I can warm up for my first ever conference presentation at the German Association of Hydrologists (FH-DGGV) meeting in Karlruhe in April this year. I'll aim to post something once I have given the presenation. Although these presentations seem small fry with what is hopefully to come, it is good to feel like my research is worthy of presentation somewhere.

On the topic of presentations I am also preparing for my milestone presentation - what is essentially the qualifying exam for my PhD. It is encouraging for me to see my research plan start to come together and I am excited about the topics I'll be working on and who I'll be collaborating with.

I have now been in my position for nine months now, so it seems kind of fitting that my wife should be expecting a baby. In May I will be adding a delightful complication to my studies, and I have heard that having children during the course of a PhD is just as crazy as any other time. And if life isn't crazy, I'm probably doing it wrong... right?

I was able to participate in my first webinar yesterday facilitated by the good people at the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN). The webinar is part of a series that has been running since October this year focusing on a range of issues relevant to the work of the RWSN.

The theme of this webinar was groundwater data and its management in the WASH sector. Various speakers discussed the importance of groundwater data and presented case studies from a number of different regions in Africa.

The importance of good groundwater data was a big theme during the webinar, particularly geographical coordinate information. Much information is either never recorded, or not available to other potential stakeholders, either due to data formats (i.e. hard copies) or formatting (i.e. consistent drilling log standards). There were a number of strategies discussed for improving data collection including easier data collection/reporting systems (such as smartphone apps) or better enforcement of data reporting standards through legal and financial incentives.

As someone very new to WASH but also experienced in hydrogeology I would have appreciated more details on how the groundwater data is used. For some of the case studies, precise location information is perhaps not so critical as they were more regional in nature. It is only once you get down to the local aquifer scale that this information becomes really important.

There is much exciting work being conducted by many organsations. I am particularly interested in mWater, WPDx and igrac and will try to keep up with their work in the future.

This webinar was a good way for me to familiarise myself with some critical issues in the WASH sector as well as introduced me to some key players working in this area. It is one of my long-term goals to get involved in this type of work and hopefully this was a step in the right direction.

For I have known them all already, known them all:   
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,        
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;   
I know the voices dying with a dying fall   
Beneath the music from a farther room.   
So how should I presume?*

I recently attended a seminar entitled 'Good Scientific Practice' presented by Prof. Alex Weber, a cell biologist at the University of Tübingen. The aim of the seminar was to encourage doctoral students here to ascribe to the aforementioned GSP in their work. I enjoyed the Prof. Weber's perspectives on how research should proceed, although as a researcher working solely in modelling I was in a minority in the audience.

The crux of good scientific practice is honesty - with respect to our planning, procedures, data interpretation and storage. Prof. Weber emphasised the importance of keeping thorough notes in a lab book and provided good examples of how this can be effective in conducting research. A lab book acts as a record of what work has been completed, and what are the outcomes. It is effectively a journal of your research.

My days are spent, for better or worse, sitting at a computer writing code to run numerical models of porous media. What does a lab book look like for someone who isn't in a lab, who's work is conducted predominantly in programming environments? The answer I came up with in my head is the Version Control System that I was introduced to early on in my doctoral studies.

A Version Control System (VCS) is something that you use to track progress of computer codes and programs. Every time you make a change or add a feature to your code you commit the changes to the VCS; the changes are stored, as well as notes that you make about what you did, and possibly why you did it. A VCS might be a stand-alone software, such as Mercurial which I use, and are often free for  non-commercial use. Using a VCS with something like BitBucket also makes it a lot easier to share coding projects with other collaborators.

Over the last few months as I have been developing codes for my work I have begun to embrace the 'commits' that I have made in my VCS - my commit comments have become more descriptive, and I can see the evolution of my project as I look back through my previous entries. I guess it is my electronic 'dear diary...' and in much the same way we might look back at our teenage diarising with a mixture of wistfulness and embarrassment do I look back on some of my efforts so far.

How are you do you measure out your research life? (The coffee spoons are a given...)

*The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. In Prufrock and Other Observations. From Poems. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1920; Bartleby.com, 2011. http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html#46.