Marshall Styczinski: Personal website

Professor Cassandra Paul is a colleague for whom I have great respect; we have crossed paths in multiple work environments related to Physics Education Research. She wrote an excellent piece on maintaining work–life balance as an academic that deeply resonated with me. Many graduate students feel pressure to work more than is necessary or appropriate, and I think most academics would benefit from heeding Prof. Paul's advice in the piece linked here.

This piece originally appeared in the Physics Education Research Consortium of Graduate Students (PERCoGS) newsletter.

W3Schools is a fantastic website filled to the brim with simple, easy-to-follow, well-organized tutorials in everything pertaining to web-based coding. You can bet that if you Google "how do I _______ in HTML/PHP/jQuery/CSS?", W3Schools will be among the top hits. If you want to get started in any web-based language, W3Schools is a great place to look. Their website makes a respectable reference for intermediate coders, too.

The usability.gov research-based web design and UI guide has made a strong impact on the way I have planned this website and affected the way I handle other websites I'm involved in. Though I won't profess to have read the entire document (not even close), a treasure trove of insight awaits you inside. The recommendations all come from research and are geared at making your website easier to use and more accessible for those with impairments.

This instant HTML editor was incredibly helpful for me getting started writing HTML. I still find it very useful when I want to test out a new idea, because I can make small tweaks and immediately see exactly how it will look on a web page. At the bottom of the page, Jesse Ruderman is listed as the author. He has a blog at www.squarefree.com called "Indistinguishable from Jesse" where he posts about online security, bug testing, and development of the Firefox browser.

The Wikibooks Latex section has many pages I use as references. I write a lot of Latex files, so I have several reference pages bookmarked. The one linked here is probably the page I use the most (for creating special characters like é and €), though I come back to several others quite often: "Floats, Figures and Captions"; "Mathematics"; "Labels and Cross-referencing"; "Hyperlinks"; and "Counters".

This document from the TeX Users Group (TUG) details formatting conventions for the finer details of numbers and expressions in scientific writing. It's a bit long-winded, but that's because it tries to give some background for how the conventions were agreed on for this type of writing. Standards are created for a reason, and I've found this document helpful for guiding style choices in formatting equations and numbers.

Stack Exchange is an online wonderland filled to the brim with well-asked and well-answered questions. The range of topic sections on Stack Exchange is vast, from graphic design to parenting to information security. Googling coding or Latex issues is likely to lead you here, as are well-worded searches regarding physics, math, or any other of the 160 Stack Exchange communities.

A helpful person named Seth Robertson has created this lovely GitHub problem-solving page, styled after a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. I stumbled across it while trying to sort out a pile of issues with a GitHub repository; since then, it's helped me find efficient solutions in a jiffy.

Stephanie Chasteen is a colleague with a very interesting history. She has meandered from physics to social science, back to physics, with science writing and communication thrown in the mix. She's now an education researcher and consultant, working to improve adoption of the products of physics education research. She has a great blog website where you can find a range of presentations and podcasts she's given. Her discussion of presenting research in science is particularly enlightening.