Irregularly Scheduled Programming

I’ve written a few times about using an image as an x-axis label, and the solutions have been slowly improving. This one blows all of them out of the water.

This journey started almost exactly a year ago, but it’s finally been sufficiently worked through and merged! Yay, I’ve officially contributed to the tidyverse (minor as it may be).

I’m at least as useful as Zoidberg

This is the last update to this strange saga… I hope.

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This started out as a “hey, I wonder…” sort of thing, but as usual, they tend to end up as interesting voyages into the deepest depths of code, so I thought I’d write it up and share. Shoutout to [@coolbutuseless](https://twitter.com/coolbutuseless) for proving that a little curiosity can go a long way and inspiring me to keep digging into interesting topics.

This is what you get if you “glue” “strings”. Photo: https://craftwhack.com/cool-craft-string-easter-eggs/

I’ve been using the reticulate package occasionally for a while now, so I was surprised to see that it had only just been officially released.

reticulate: R interface to Python https://t.co/qVWmwoMQAP. Comprehensive set of interoperability tools including R Markdown Python engine #rstats #pydata pic.twitter.com/SuWM6Y3Pk0

— RStudio (@rstudio) March 26, 2018

If that’s not a great 1960’s band name then I don’t know what is (hint: I don’t know what is).

This was just going to be a few Tweets but it ended up being a bit of a rollercoaster of learning for me, and I haven’t blogged in far too long, so I’m writing it up quickly as a ‘hey look at that’ example for newcomers.

Since about October last year, I’ve been writing an introduction to R book. It’s been quite the experience. I’ve finally started making time to document some of the interesting things I’ve learned (about R, about writing, about how to bring those two together) along the way.

They say “if you want to find an answer on the internet, just present a wrong one as fact. Then wait.”

Open-source software is awesome. If I found that a piece of closed-source software was missing a feature that I wanted, well, bad luck. I probably couldn’t even tell if was actually missing or if I just didn’t know about it. When the source is available, maintained, and documented however, things get fun. We can identify, and perhaps fill gaps.