benjaminrigsby Get a baseline. It’s a good rule of thumb that will rarely steer you wrong. It puts the “fail fast” mantra in a more productive frame. (Not that anything is particularly wrong with that mantra.) So what does “get a baseline” even mean? A baseline is putting something on the board. If you’re planning a … Read more
If everything is figured out, then there is no need to question and no mysteries to uncover with curiosity. We Thought We Solved Everything… I’ve been pondering whether those of us haunted by impostor syndrome are onto something. Perhaps it’s not us but those without this self-doubt who are missing the mark. Maybe we’re not … Read more
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
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
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
I often run into a scenario when writing unit tests and mocking up code where I need to convert a block of text data into Python format. Whether it’s data from a CSV file, an email, or even a simple copy-paste from a spreadsheet, manually converting text data to make it play nice with Python … Read more
(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
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
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
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