Some of the papers/repos I admire the most don’t necessarily have the most important methods but have the nicest tables, layout and cleanest code and clearest APIs.

I know I’m conflating several notions of design here but I’ve noticed that some researchers seem to excel at both writing beautiful papers and code as well as maintaining visually nice and well-written blogs. There seems to be a pattern in the sense that care is afforded to the presentation of the work, and this quality becomes a part of the “brand” of the researcher.

Meanwhile, some of the code that has been the most useful for my research has been appallingly written and some of the papers that I’ve found the most useful have been barely understandable and riddled with grammatical and even spelling mistakes.

Obviously one should strive to present their work in the best way possible, so how does a PhD student who writes average quality research code and creates average Inkscape figures “level up” in terms of research and code presentation?