Maëlle's R blog

Removing Disqus from my blogdown blog had been on my mind for a while, ever since I saw Bob Rudis’ tweet enjoining Noam Ross to not use it for his brand-new website. The same Twitter thread introduced me to Utterances, a “lightweight comments widget built on GitHub issues”, which I have at last installed to my blog in lieu of Disqus. How did I manage to not lose anything of value? How easy was it to switch tools? Read on to learn more!

Last week, Axios published a very interesting piece reporting on Trump’s private schedule thanks to an insider’s leak. The headlines all were about Trump’s spending more than 60% of his time in “executive time” which admittedly was indeed the most important aspect of the story. I, however, also got curious about Axios’ work to go from the PDF schedules to the spreadsheet they made public. In this post, I’ll have a got at using rOpenSci’s Jeroen Ooms’ pdftools package and some data-wrangling stubborness of mine to try and rectangle Trump’s PDF schedules.

I’ve now given my talk about “How to be a resilient R user” three times, at R-Ladies Strasbourg and R-Ladies Paris in person, and at R-Ladies San José via Google Hangouts. It was fun! I covered part of the content of that talk in a blog post about where to get R help. Today, it’s time for a post full of my personal opinions! I’ll cover the rest of the talk: why and how stay up to date with R news?

Here we go again, using a Twitter trend as blog fodder! Colin Fay launched an inspiring movement by sharing his R goals of 2019.

My #RStats goals for 2019:

1️⃣ Becoming entirely fluent with {data.table}

2️⃣ Getting at ease with {Rcpp}

What are yours?#rdatatable #rcpp

— Colin Fay 🤘 (@_ColinFay) December 29, 2018

It’s been quite interesting reading the objectives of other tweeps: what they want to learn, make, how they want to get involved in the community, etc. As Mike Kearney, rtweet’s maintainer, underlined, it is excellent reading material!

Excellent reading material–tweets about 2019 #rstats goals: https://t.co/6wrGeqsWbm

— Mike Kearney📊 (@kearneymw) December 31, 2018

… but also blogging material! Let me fetch and tokenize these tweets to summarize them!

Disclaimer: I later saw that Jason Baik got the same idea and was faster than I, find the analysis here.

As 2018 nears its end, it’s time for me to look back on my R/Twitter year with the same simple method as last year: let me identify and webshoot my 9 best tweets of 2018!