The Alison Hill Effect
Posted on October 4, 2019
(Last modified on October 5, 2019)
| 1 minutes
| 164 words
| Alex Whan
We were very privileged to have Alison Hill visiting in Canberra this week, and amongst other things, she gave an R-Ladies workshop on getting started with blogdown. I started this blog 3 1⁄2 years ago in Jekyll, and have been wanting to switch over to blogdown for ages (and in fact, blaming my embarassing lack of posts on waiting until after making the switch). I changed over to hugo and netlify a few months ago, but things weren’t quite right.
[Read More]
Snakes, ladders, dplyr and purrr
Posted on May 30, 2016
(Last modified on October 4, 2019)
| 11 minutes
| 2203 words
| Alex Whan
On the weekend I was playing snakes and ladders with my sons. Since it’s a game without any element of skill, and relies completely on the roll of the dice, I haven’t played the game for about as long as I can remember. The first game we played was over pretty quickly, but the second lasted for what seemed like an eternity, and well past the endurance of the boys’ attention span.
[Read More]
What's in a [package] Name?
Posted on April 19, 2016
(Last modified on October 4, 2019)
| 3 minutes
| 480 words
| Alex Whan
There are now more than 8000 packages available on CRAN, each of them presumably lovingly designed by their respective creators. As a naive package developer, and reading Hadley’s guide to naming packages I’m interested in how people choose names for their packages. A great package name is a beautiful thing (will anyone beat lubridate?). In a process perhaps similar to naming a child (sorry kids), I expect this is something that the parent of the package takes great pains over, but those who use the name in the future don’t necessarily think about, unless it is particularly good, or bad.
[Read More]
Pride and Prejudice and R
Posted on April 15, 2016
(Last modified on October 4, 2019)
| 3 minutes
| 470 words
| Alex Whan
One of the things I love about R, and the R community, is getting a bit of an understanding of what types of analysis other people do. While we might all work on such different areas of research or analysis, the shared language gives lots of common ground.
I’ve been interested over the years seeing the work done around the place in the analysis of language, which is so far removed from my own area of study (genetics).
[Read More]
ggplot2 and Joy Division
Posted on March 24, 2016
(Last modified on October 4, 2019)
| 3 minutes
| 599 words
| Alex Whan
A while ago I had had a great time answering a question on stackoverflow that was asking about recreating a plot from a fivethirtyeight article in ggplot2. You can see the original and my attempt below. I was satisfied with the style, but felt a bit dirty introducing a for loop.
fivethirtyeight original ggplot2 version Recreating other well known data visualisations is a reasonably common challenge for people who are into that sort of thing (see all the different recreations of Minard’s famous figure, some of them collected here).
[Read More]
Yet Another R Blog
Posted on March 23, 2016
(Last modified on October 4, 2019)
| 1 minutes
| 196 words
| Alex Whan
So I finally started an R blog - not because I feel like I’ve got so much to really share, but because I enjoy reading the contributions from so many keen R bloggers, I hoped to be able to contribute some small thing to that world.
The specific catalyst was following Dean Attali’s work, and the simplicity of implementing his beautiful jekyll theme. For any other lurkers out there, there is no excuse not to get something up and running (aside from time to actually write content of course… I set this up five months ago).
[Read More]