Blog

Drawing of two people, the first proundly displays a screen full of code while saying “Behold an Amazing Function!”. The second person looks a bit scared and replies “I would rather not behold...”.

Packaging your R code

R
data science
tutorial

A tutorial to guide you as you make your first (or hundredth) minimal R package.
Jan 19, 2023
Zak Varty

Two happy looking round fuzzy monsters, each holding a similarly shaped wrench with the word “wrangle” on it. Between their tools is held up a rectangular data table labeled “TIDY.”

Data Wrangling

data science
data wrangling
tutorial

Get your data ducks in a line using base R and the tidyverse.
Jan 6, 2023
Zak Varty

The text APIs and httr, written on a black hexagon.

Aquiring Data via an API

data science
data acquisition
tutorial

Part 2 of a mini-series on aquiring data from the web, focusing on data aquisition via APIs.
Dec 14, 2022
Zak Varty

git logo. This is a red-orange square with rounded corners, it is rotated by 45 degrees so that it is standing on one corner and has a cut-out design representing a branching graph.

Git: putting your new feature out into the world.

workflows
git

A git workflow to put a local feature out in the wild, then tidy up after yourself.
Dec 13, 2022
Zak Varty

Hexagonal logo of the rvest package; a sickle cutting wheat on a red background.

Web Scraping with {rvest}

data science
data acquisition
tutorial

Part 1 of a mini-series on aquiring data from the web, focusing on scraping webpages using the {rvest} package.
Dec 1, 2022
Zak Varty

Header section of a PLOS Comptational Biology perspective paper titled 'Good Enough Practices in Scientific Computing'.

Good Enough Practices in Scientific Computing

academic skills
computing
reproducible research
reading summary

Reading Summary of Wilson et al. (2017).
Oct 19, 2022
Zak Varty

BBC dumbbell plot showing stations with the largest gaps between previous and new records, ordered by the highest new temperature.

Data Journalism: Recreating a Professional Plot

data visualisation

Recreating a plot of record breaking temperatures by the BBC data journalism team.
Oct 15, 2022
Zak Varty

Stacked bar chart of yarn weights on Ravelry. Bars are descending order by their fequency, with yarn-type labels written within the bars and count values to the right of the bars. Annotations indicate that the most popular yarn weights are Fingering and Double Knit, and that there were more missing yarn weights than in all remaining categories combined.

Tidy Tuesday: Ravelry Yarn

data visualisation
tidy tuesday

Tidy Tuesday 2022 || Week 41
Oct 12, 2022
Zak Varty

Photograph of the mathematics section of Blackwell's book shop in Oxford.

Recommended Statistics Books

academic skills
reading

Book recommendations for those looking to reinforce their knowledge of undergraduate and advanced statistics.
Oct 10, 2022
Zak Varty

Photograph of a filing cabinet filled with library index cards.

Writing a rhetorical précis

academic skills
writing
reading

Structured summaries to remember and retrieve what you read
Oct 7, 2022
Zak Varty

Mechanical typewriter on white background.

Setting up a quarto blog

quarto
tutorial

Adding a blog within a quarto website
Sep 26, 2022
Zak Varty

The text Hello, World` written in red monospaced font inside curly braces on a grey background.

Hello, World!

Quarto
Templates

A minimal first post
Sep 26, 2022
Zak Varty
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