To my kids, You don’t exist, but today I couldn’t stop thinking about you. You haven’t even been born yet (and honestly I don’t know if or when you will be), and there’s already so much I want to say to you, because the world you’ll be born in to is not the one I hoped or thought it would be. You and the rest of the future humans deserve a world that’s better than the one we just decided to give…
Hi! It’s been a while. How’s it going? Around here, things are moving . They’re moving quickly. I’ve heard my professors say that a PhD is a weird time in life, because nothing really happens or changes for years in the middle of it, and then at the end EVERYTHING HAPPENS AT ONCE. Based on my last three months, I vouch 100% for the truth of that statement. The first big thing is that I’m looking…
an interesting graph For several popular programming languages, this chart shows the gender breakdown of the owners of public GitHub repositories. Each owner’s gender was algorithmically predicted from the first name they choose to display on their GitHub profile. (Click it to see a larger static version). The interactive version is here! You can sort by any gender category by clicking on the…
Today I wanted to make a new GitHub repository from a subdirectory of an existing repository, preserving the commit history. There’s a nice help article on how to do this, but I had to do a bit of exploration (read: break a few things) to learn what would happen when I followed those instructions. Here are the details on what I ended up doing! The goal: pop the polyester subdirectory of my…
I spent a lot of last week documenting an R package. I’m still learning how to write good user-facing features (including documentation) in my software, so I asked Twitter for advice on two things: (1) what are some R packages with stellar documentation?, and (2) is there a documentation style guide? I got some great responses! Here’s the full Twitter conversation . And here are some of the cool…
I spent most of last week at a big biostatistics conference . Overall it was a great time - there were mixers and free coffee and old friends and new friends and famous keynote speakers and lots of talks. It was also exhausing, due to the huge number of people, the early-morning sessions, and all the talks. So many talks! One thing I noticed about the conference talks was that most speakers with…
This is the story of a rabbit hole I went down on Thursday night. The unexpected consequence of this long journey was that I got brave enough to submit a pull request to a popular Python project! It was my first attempt at contributing to a large-ish open-source project, and I consider that a tiny victory. The story begins when I received my beta invite to try out Atom , a text editor made by…
Choosing the perfect set of colors for a plot is hard. But people have thought a lot about this problem, and there are solutions! If you’re an R user looking for publication-quality color schemes that are backed by lots of scientific research, check out RColorBrewer , or use the color schemes in ggplot2 . If, on the other hand, you’re looking for a color scheme that reminds you of a bag of…
I’ve encountered a few hilariously useless error messages while coding recently. They got me thinking about error messages in general and wondering about the best way to build good error messages into my own software. Some hilarious messages I’ve seen: Error in listClassName(“Compressed”, class(x)) : Could not find a ‘CompressedList’ subclass for values of type…
Here’s part 2 in my series on fantastic blog posts written by other people! See part 1 for more favorites. Peter Seibel proposes an approach to code reading that doesn’t treat pieces of code like literature. Some people make the following argument: you would never meet a novelist - a writer of novels - that didn’t read novels. Nor should we ever meet programmers - writers of code - who never read…