Tips

Tips for CS PhD students

PhD writing

• Write now! Harold Thimbleby
• How to write a paper
• Writing a good scientific paper

PhD viva

• Chetcuti, D., Cacciottolo, J., & Vella, N. (2022). What do examiners look for in a PhD thesis? Explicit and implicit criteria used by examiners across disciplines. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 47(8), 1358–1373.

Researcher website

This website was built using this GitHub project, which is also a GitHub template. Feel free to fork it and make your own academic website.

Tips for CS undergrad students

Learning Computer Science

• Computerphile YouTube channel has a good collection of introductory videos for essential computer science concepts.
• Donald, E. Knuth. "The art of computer programming." book series is a must to read for those interested in computer science.
• Cormen, T. H., et al. "Introduction to algorithms" series is an essential to understand algorithms analysis.

Learning Competitive programming

• Halim, F., Skiena, S. S., & Revilla, M. A. Competitive programming series is essential for competitive programming
• Online Systems
• https://onlinejudge.org
• https://www.hackerrank.com
• https://leetcode.com

Learning Machine Learning

• Welch Labs has many good visual tutorial about machine learning.
• This one is about Deep Learning https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiaHhY2iBX9hdHaRr6b7XevZtgZRa1PoU
• Yann LeCun’s Deep Learning Course

Tips for mental health

Mental health tools

• Lechblock extension to disable unwanted website browsing.
• Pomodoro technique to support on task engagement resistance.

Mental health in general

• Book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life
• Book Trust Yourself: Stop Overthinking and Channel Your Emotions

Mental health for Academics

• "I Think Well" website
• The Struggling Scientists Podcast (PhD students talking about Mental Health): website, youtube, and Instagram profile.
• Book Doctoral De-Stress: How to Thrive on Your PhD Journey
• Book Building a Second Brain

Mindful Productivity

• Book Feel-Good Productivity
• Book Building a Second Brain
• Videos on Digital Minimalist

Tips for software tools

For code editing

• VSCode for programming.
• Antigravity for agent-based programming.
• Git for version control of source code.
• Github for source code storage.
• MkDocs and GitHub Pages for websites and documentation (this website uses it).

For doing slides

• marp and marp-vscode create slides using markdown.
• mermaid to create diagrams (e.g., graphs, blocks, class) using text.

For Machine Learning

• pytorch for Deep Learning development.
• metaflow for DAG workflows.
• wandb for experiment tracking.

For writing academic papers and reports

• Latex to write papers and reports.
• Overleaf to host and collaborate Latex documents
• Zotero to manager references
• James-Yu.latex-workshop to edit LaTeX documents locally.
• MiKTeX and Strawberry Perl as a LaTeX engine on Windows.

For web browsing

• Scrip Control extension to block unwanted adverts by disabling JavaScript for specific sites.
• Video Download Helper extension to download videos from web.
• Lechblock extension to disable unwanted website browsing.