How to Thrive as a PhD student in PL
summary
Treat classes as an investment and stop taking them for the sake of neat rewards; measure progress by time and energy spent, not only by finished proofs or bug fixes (one long-running garbage‑collector bug never gets fixed, it just disappears). Keep two projects so you can switch when stuck, use a brain dump and a throwaway monorepo — make the damn repo — schedule short daily focus windows, accept imperfections with we did it the way we did it.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:48Undergrad vs grad mentality
- 5:13Managing rewards and burnout
- 11:17Energy and time management
- 13:53Handling deadlines and schedules
- 17:13Focus vs. non-focus work
- 21:11Defining research and tasks
- 26:22Managing projects and chaos
- 33:13Overcoming perfectionism
- 38:14Communication and writing
- 42:32Q&A and closing thoughts
related talks
49mManaging your Research, your Advisor, your PhD
50mHow I'm Becoming a Programmer
48mEnding Keynote: 7 Principles of Productive Software Developers
41mContinuous Learning, Teaching and the Art of Improving Yourself
45mGrowing old gracefully: on being a career programmer.
01h 00mBuilding better developers
26mWhat Happens When You Don't Write the Code — Advice I Wish I'd Taken 10 Years Ago
29mThink Pragmatically: Elevating Your Go Development Skills