It’s Time to Upgrade Our Microsoft Office Knowledge

No excuses. SharePoint, Power Automate, Forms, and yes, Excel. You heard it here first. If “I’m not good at computers” is something you say, no worries. It’s Office, so it’s designed with you in mind! You got this. If “I’m a dev, so Office is easy for me” is something you think, you’re probably right. … Read more

My Foray into RPA: Hold Your Nose and Try Out Power Automate in the Office 365 Cloud

Intro I’ve collided with the term “RPA” every now and then and thought “I need to dig into that more, but isn’t that just software development? Why is it called something else?” Well, it IS something different. Previously, I’ve written off anything Microsoft Office because I’m a real developer, dammit! I’ve recently had the opportunity … Read more

Messing Around with ChatGPT’s and Copilot’s Python Coding Abilities

Overview I’ve been testing out ChatGPT’s capabilities for a few months with different tasks including quantitative and development questions. In a few cases, I’ll write the code and then see how ChatGPT solves it (or if it does). This case was particularly interesting because I didn’t give it a bunch of instructions to start with … Read more

What should a Ph.D. student do if their scientific writing doesn’t seem good enough? Is there any way to improve it?

(Adapted from an answer I gave several years ago to this question on Quora) I’m assuming you are actively writing. If not, you must start there. Here are some things I have tried to follow to improve my scientific writing: Understand the basic parts of a scientific paper. This might sound trivial, but it is the … Read more

My Gear and Tools

This page has a bunch of info about stuff that I own. I’ve mostly put things that I recommend on this page, and tried to provide useful feedback/advice wherever possible. I constantly try to find gear, tools, and systems to smooth out the day to day bumps in my life. Hopefully this page gives you … Read more

Inkscape vs. Affinity Designer

Overview: There are many pros to Affinity Designer from my experience and only a few cons. Would I recommend it? Yes, if you are using Inkscape often (once per month or more), Designer is definitely worth buying (wait for 50% off sale price). Disclaimer: Many things I mention are probably possible in Designer and Inkscape. … Read more

A Systematic Guide to Literature Reviews

As a graduate student, I’ve looked at hundreds of research papers. Over the years, I realized the necessity to develop a system for myself to effectively keep track of, organize, and process – in a word, harness – all this knowledge. Further, I realized I needed to have a system that made it easy to … Read more