Step 1, Get a Baseline
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…
We Thought We Solved Everything. Then the Printer Jammed.
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…
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…
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…
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…
Practical Dev Notes: Simple Util to Convert Plain Text to Python Format
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…
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…
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,…
An Authorship Framework for Research Papers
Authorship disputes are a persistent problem in academia, and they often lead to feelings of resentment. These disputes are a waste of energy, discouraging, and (mostly) avoidable. To reduce the…
My Journey with 3D Printing and How to Get Started
In the summer of 2017, I dove into 3D printing head first. I’d only used a 3D printer two or three times previously, so it was a plunge. I got…