Rstats

Just a few notes for those wondering how I built this site. I’m utilizing R with Yahui’s fantastic package blogdown.

Blogdown utilizes Hugo which is a website generator: it compiles a bunch of files so that they can be served in a website. The nice thing about Hugo is that being open source, it has a large community that contribute themes and plugins. While Hugo has many themes to choose from, I’ve had difficulties finding one that work well with blogdown.

As I build this blog, I’ve been looking for expressive datasets to illustrate ideas and examples. For data management, I found the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Bureau of Transportation Statistics delays and cancellation dataset appealing for two reasons: first, it contains a good mixture of variable types (date and time, categorical and numerical); recond, on a personal level, I’ve always been interested in aviation. This dataset is available from Kaggle, or directly from DOT.

useR! 2016 The useR! conference in Stanford was awesome. Never did I expect to see so many participants (read: data geeks) and high level sponsors. For what was a little known language that’s been around in one form or another since the late seventies, this is quite amazing. Some memorable talks: People are doing really amazing things with Shiny. I was amazed at the pervasiveness of Shiny at EA Games.