Tips, advice, and suggestions

• Grants: This slide deck was prepared for Boston University PhD students and includes some slides on specific BU resources, but is generally applicable

General tools

• Code editor: Visual Studio Code

  Some favorite plugins

  • GitHub Copilot
  • GitLens
  • Code Runner
  • Better Comments
  • Rainbow CSV
  • LaTeX Workshop
  • Markdown All in One
  • Stata Enhanced with stataRun
  • Live Share Extension Pack
  • Remote Development Extension Pack
  • Python with Ruff
  • Better Solarized (theme)

• Digital notes, LaTeX ready out of the box: Obsidian

  Some favorite plugins

  • Advanced Tables
  • Extended MathJax
  • LaTeX Suite
  • Dataview
  • Graph Analysis
  • Linter
  • Metatable
  • Mind Map
  • Obsidian Git
  • Ozan’s Image in Editor Plugin
  • Templater
  • Zotero Integration

• Dark Mode for all web browsing: Dark Reader

• Flexible, manual, time tracking (free for personal use): Toggl Track

• Flexible flashcards to learn anything: Anki

• Color-blindness simulator: Coblis

• Password manager: BitWarden, an open-source software—the free version is very good, better than alternatives (which spend more on advertisement), and the paid version is $10/year

LaTeX

• So that appendix slides do not count towards the total slide number: appendixnumberbeamer

• Make hyper-references back from bibliography to citation: backref

• A TikZ GUI tool for simple TikZ graphs and string diagrams: TikZiT

• An interesting customizable Beamer theme that is a good starting point to build your own themes: Torino theme

R

• Super fast data.table (data managing package) to Stata translation and cheatsheet

• Super fast fixest (R regressions package) to Stata translation

• A comprehensive machine learning framework which utilizes native parallelization and fast data.table: mlr3

• ggplot2 tutorial

• Set up custom fonts for your R figures: showtext

• Combining R figures: patchwork

Other programming languages

• Julia: a list of useful tutorials and packages

• Stata: Want to see which packages are “hot” (popular)? ssc hot New (or newly updated)? ssc new

Managing your Mac

• MacOS package manager: Homebrew

• MacOS configuration files (dotfiles): A popular dotfile collection

• Git dotfiles synchronizer (across machines): Homeshick