go document your journey — This is a short post I wanted to make to encourage some friends or readers to embrace documenting their journey. Let’s get into it. This needs to be said: It’s okay to share your work, even if it’s not perfect. The benefit to you is that it helps you collect…

a short reflection on contributing to open source — I read Don Jones’ Own Your Tech Career book this year and one of his suggestions about being part of a technology community stuck with me. It was something along the lines of: “Don’t be a parasite. Find a way to contribute.” Originally, I had a mindset that I didn’t…

great resources to learn javascript — My main language of choice is R, but I’ve used simple CSS or JS to enhance a few Shiny apps in the past. That meant usually going through FreeCodeCamp and W3Schools tutorials or searching Stackoverflow when I have questions requiring it. I didn’t feel confident about my web development skills…

The year’s almost up. Close enough. Here are eleven R packages I’ve enjoyed using this year, in no special order: Automate repetitive tasks {searcher}— provides a search interface directly inside of R for Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Ecosia, rseek, Twitter, StackOverflow, RStudio Community, GitHub, and BitBucket {usethis} — provides many useful functions to…

a shiny app companion to the targets R package — Just realized I missed a blog post last month. 😲🤭 Here’s a short one on a project I’ve been working on for fun. {targetsketch} is a R/Shiny app companion to the targets R package. I found out about it in early September and decided to be a contributor in my…

To my surprise, since I don’t think I do, I’ve been asked a few times how I code so fast. To be helpful, I’ve pointed to keyboard shortcuts as the reason. It’s more efficient to use them and I’m shocked by how many people don’t. Nowadays, to make things even…

Here are the steps I followed to render the Quarto version of Hands on Programming with R into an EPUB for easy use with Apple Books (my reading app of choice). …

Last week I switched over to Alfred. I’ve used the native Spotlight on my Mac for years and I thought that it was good enough to get the job done. Basically, I didn’t feel the need to switch over before but then decided to experiment with some new project workflows…