Techy workflow stuff

Arxiv

I wrote a bot that sends me readable HTML-formatted emails with my arXiV subscriptions. To fork it and get it running for your own purposes, see the repository here: https://github.com/tbrazel/arxiv-email.

GitHub

To host a LaTeX project on GitHub, I use this setup by Pieter Belmans. This uses workflows to build a pdf on push, and compiles the pdf to an orphaned branch so that the repository contains an updated pdf without it being tracked. With the right .gitignore, the only changes tracked by GitHub are to the .tex files themselves, which makes collaboration and version control really easy. Some other stuff for this workflow:

LaTeX

I use a Vim setup with UltiSnips, which uses Python and Regex for macros in writing LaTeX.

Website hosting

This website is hosted on GitHub - if you're not sure how to start a "username.io" website, there's a good reference to get started here. If you want to host your academic website on your department's server, for example, but you'd still like version control (and you don't want to use an app like Fetch or Cyberduck every time you want to update your website), I recommend using a third-party service like DeployHQ, which links a GitHub repository to your SFTP credentials. This way every time you want to update your webpage, just commit to your repository, and DeployHQ will launch it for you.

Keeping track of math papers

I use Zotero to organize math papers. If you make sure the automatic importing gets accurate metadata, this makes it really easy to quickly generate BibTex citations for papers you're working with.

References

Listservs

Algebraic databases

Even more databases here! mathbases.org

Web apps for typesetting stuff

  • Quiver, for Tikz commutative diagrams

Things I frequently need to copy/paste

For LaTeX stuff

a .gitignore file for LaTeX projects
hack to get autoref running correctly
regex for math mode and prose snippets