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
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
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 chance of disputes in my lab, I reviewed a couple of journal papers on authorship guidelines and an example or two that other labs had … Read more
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 a budget 3D printer kit (Tevo Tarantula) after watching a bunch of different reviews (see below for reviewers I trust on 3D printers). Building the … Read more
This post outlines the system of inboxing that allows me to keep track of everything, or at least most things. These apps and methods are a result of trying many different things over the years. Todoist: I use Todoist as my task management tool. For inboxing, I use Todoist’s task inbox. I just type in … Read more
For several years, the question of ‘Am I qualified enough?’ has plagued me. Should I do more? What if I do too much and become over-qualified!