misc

If you're reading this and you're probably considering a PhD or are already in one please feel to reach out to me if you have any questions or just want to chat. I'm always happy to help.

As a PhD student, you will have your highs and lows just like anything you've put a lot of time and effort into. It's important to recognize both and have a community to share them both equally.

Here are a few resources that have helped me along the way in addition to all the help and support I got from my advisors, friends, and family.

• The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.
• So You're Starting a PhD? by Mike Rosulek at Oregon State University.
• De-Mystifying Good Research and Good Papers
• How to Referee a Paper by Alan Jay Smith at University of California, Berkeley.
• You and Your Research by Richard Hamming.
• A Survival Guide to a PhD by Andrej Karpathy.
• How to graduate your PhD when you have no hope
• Phd Comics

Few more that are just as important but also general good advice:

• How to Get New Ideas
• How to Do Great Work
• How to Ask Good Questions / Don't ask to ask, just ask / The XY Problem
• How to Not Get Stuck
• How to Write Good Technical Documentation

What I strive to be:

All of these people will play a role in my ultimate success as a dystopian warlord philosopher. However, the most important person in my gang will be a systems programmer. A person who can debug a device driver or a distributed system is a person who can be trusted in a Hobbesian nightmare of breathtaking scope; a systems programmer has seen the terrors of the world and understood the intrinsic horror of existence. The systems programmer has written drivers for buggy devices whose firmware was implemented by a drunken child or a sober goldfish. The systems program- mer has traced a network problem across eight machines, three time zones, and a brief diversion into Amish country, where the problem was transmitted in the front left hoof of a mule named Deliverance. The systems program- mer has read the kernel source, to better understand the deep ways of the universe, and the systems programmer has seen the comment in the scheduler that says “DOES THIS WORK LOL,” and the systems programmer has wept instead of LOLed, and the systems programmer has submitted a kernel patch to restore balance to The Force and fix the priority inversion that was causing MySQL to hang. A systems programmer will know what to do when society breaks down, because the systems programmer already lives in a world without law.

− The Night Watch, James Mickens