Another ‘small learning project’ for me as I continue to learn Julia. I’ve said many times that small projects with a defined goal are one of the best ways to learn, at least for me. This one was inspired by yet another Reddit post
Where for (loop) ARt Thou?
A loop by any other name...
I’ve long been interested in exactly how R works - not quite enough for me to learn all the internals, but I was surprised that I could not find a clear guide towards exactly how vectorization works at the deepest level.
[Read More]Codegolf - Lisp Edition
I occasionally like a round of code-golf (e.g. recently) and I try to solve these with R, but this one gave me some hope that I could make use of a really cool feature I knew about in common lisp.

lisp is timeless. https://xkcd.com/297
Codegolfing Minecraft Lighting
I occasionally like to participate in an odd sport known as ‘code golf’ where the aim is to write some code to achieve a given task using the smallest number of characters.

The tradtional way to cheat at golf is to lower your score
Adventures in x86 ASM with rx86
I just finished ‘Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software’ by Charles Petzold which was a really well-written (in my opinion) guided journey from flashing a light in morse code through to building a whole computer, and everything needed along the way.
The section on encoding instructions for the processor (built up from logic gates) - assembly instructions as a human readable version of the machine code - was particularly interesting to me, and as I was describing this to a colleague I remembered that it’s not the first time I’ve played with assembly…

x86 assembly instructions
Improving a Visualization
I saw this post on Reddit’s r/dataisbeautiful showing this plot of streaming services market share, comparing 2020 to 2021

US Streaming Services Market Share, 2020 vs 2021
and thought it looked like a good candidate for trying out some plot improvement techniques.
[Read More]isEven without modulo
You may have seen the memes going around about fun ways to program the
straightforward function isEven()
which returns TRUE
if the input is even,
and FALSE
otherwise. I had a play with this and it turned into enough for a
blog post, and a nice walk through some features of R.
r-bugs :: object_size
As soon as the R-Foundation posted that they’re inviting cleanup of old bugs, I knew it would be an opportunity to learn more about the way R works on the inside.
[Read More]{ggtext} for images as x-axis labels
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.
[Read More]forcats::fct_match
A small tidyverse contribution
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