Successfully tending your research ideas — Further along your research career, you will move from working exclusively on research project to managing several research projects at various stages of development. One metaphor that is useful for managing these projects is thinking about your research as a garden. Not everyone idea will flourish, but tend a good…

Creative and open-ended tasks, new features to a product, and research tasks seem like they should be simple. You think of a goal, you start your work, and with a lot of effort, you will be eventually be done. But something awaits. The reality is that an invisible and…

While technical interviews have many problems, see: https://blog.usejournal.com/hiring-is-broken-what-do-developers-say-about-technical-interviews-21821141ca71. One reoccurring theme is the feeling of anxiety and stress associated with coding under the surveillance of the interviewer. In a recently accepted paper, “Does Stress Impact Technical Interview Performance?” by Mahnaz Behroozi, Shivani Shirolkar, Titus Barik, and Chris Parnin we found…

We read tens of thousands of Hacker News (HN) comments, so you don’t have to. Read on for a summary of our latest research results [pre-print]. Prelude Let’s begin with a technical interview problem. Consider the following coding question from LeetCode, an online platform for preparing software development candidates for interviews:

Years of research can be wasted by failing to write a paper introduction that convinces a reviewer to read on. Writing a great introduction could take weeks, even after years of practice. But that’s not the goal of this post. We will strive for a more simple goal: Lessen the…

I make sure I allocate time every week to work deliberately on an important goal. I have used for the following work schedule for the past one year. Productivity methods are drawn from ideas such as Deep Work and Getting Things Done. As a result of this work schedule, I’ve…

You have 30 minutes to do a task. Really, just 30 minutes. Because in 31 minutes you have a presentation that you have no slides for. 20 minutes into the task, you realize you have been fiddling with a diagram on slide 2. You rush to finish the last bit of…