A curated list of practical tips and tricks to help you achieve an awesome CS master thesis.

☆=(ゝ･ω･)/

• Workflows
  • Research Ideas
  • Meetings
  • Searching
    • Searching techniques
    • Searching through academic material
  • Tools
• Artifacts
  • Code
    • Searching for code
  • Data
    • Designing a dataset
    • Obtainig a dataset
• Experiments
  • Designing experiments
  • Running experiments
  • Benchmarking
• Writing
  • Scientific writing
  • Writer's block
  • Spell-check
  • Latex
  • Graphics
  • Books
• Defending your thesis
  • Slide-deck
  • Presentation
• Mental health
• Women in STEM
• Tools
  • Workflows
    • File Versioning
  • Artifacts
    • File Sharing
    • Backups
  • Experiments
    • Remote Control
  • Writing
    • Bibliography Management
    • Searching and indexing code
• Yet unsorted but awesome
• Acknowledgements
• Contribute

Workflows and tips to help you manage your thesis like a pro.

• Applying Agile Methodologies to Design and Programming - you can apply agile methodologies to many things ;)

• How to come up with new research ideas

Keep notes during meetings, and keep files organized and shareable.

• Effective Meeting Minutes

Searching for information can be a daunting task.

• google dorks - dorking, is a powerful technique to query search engines
• +Fravia's search lores - information is outdated, but still a valuable resource for searchers to understand the web
  • Feed the search engines with synonyms - "broaden your search results by using synonyms for words you are unsure about"
  • The weird ways of searching and the weird findings - explore the web differently

• Google scholar - your first place to go when looking for papers and patents Stand on the shoulders of giants
• How to read a paper - powerful tips to understand papers, and save time.
• Efficient reading of papers in science and technology

• Concept, mind, and argument mapping - different kinds of mind-mapping explained

With great artifacts comes a great thesis, put a readme in every directory, and keep it tidy and understandable to others!

Making experiments easily replayable might be of help to your advisors to crack problems with you, keep code and docs tidy.

• coding conventions - keep your code consistent and readable
• documentation - document where you can :)
  • how to document your code responsibly -

• advanced searching on github - powerful search tools
• https://www.pudn.com - huge database of code (pay or contribute to download ...but just knowing the file names inside a package might help searching ;)

• Scraping techniques
  • Beginner guide with Beautiful SOUP - Beautiful Soup is a python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files
  • Selenium with Python - Selenium with Python libary allows your script to interact with the website

Be proactive, carefully pick your next steps, don't be afraid of proposing and defending different solutions.

• AWS - you can use an amazon micro instance for free for 1 year ;)

Running benchmarks is a delicate part of your thesis, these resources will help you

• Benchmarking Crimes - This paper explores oversights in benchmarking

• Harvard College Writing Center Writing Resources
• PrettyWrite - Practical Thesis-writing Guidelines for Master Students
• How to write a research paper - these awesome tips also apply to your thesis

• Chrisper
• Academic Writing Check
• aspell
• Grammarly

• Latex
• CS PhD dissertation latex template
• Latex Tutorial

Use high resolution scalar images (PNG), or vectorial formats (SVG/PDF) for images included in your thesis.

• Tikz
• draw.io - When Tikz doesn't work out, draw.io might save you
• The Noun Project- Icons for everything with permissive licenses

• BUGS in Writing - debug your writing skills

• The best thesis defense is a good thesis offense
• How to give a talk
• How to prepare a talk

• How to avoid death by PowerPoint
• Life after death by PowerPoint

Almost there! がんばって!

• Presentation Advices

Student mental health resources.

• Awesome mental health - curated list of resources

• BU CS resources - Women in Computer Science - useful resources for women in STEM.

• Trello - A web-based kanban-like project management application.

• The Git Book - the git book
• Github Cheat Sheet - A list of cool features of Git and GitHub

• Dropbox - Dropbox is a modern workspace designed to reduce busywork – so you can focus on the things that matter.
• Google Drive - Cloud Storage & File Backup for Photos, Docs & More
• Nextcloud - Open source cloud and collaboration platform based on ownCloud
• ownCloud - ownCloud is the largest Open Source Content Collaboration Platform in the world

[TBD]

Check out your long running experiments

• Chrome Remote Desktop - a nice remote desktop software tool with multiplatform support (09/2018, Running on Ubuntu require some fiddling)

• Zotero - Your personal research assistant
• Mendeley - Easy referencing
• JabRef - JabRef is an open source bibliography reference manager
• Papis - A Python based command line manager

• Elixir - a lightweight source referencer for C/C++ projects
• OpenGrok - source code/cross referencing engine
• silversearcher-ag - ditch your grep, silversearcher is a blazing fast code searching tool
• cscope - tool for browsing C source code
• ctags - generate tag files for different programming languages

• Survival Skills for Graduate School and Beyond -

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