Python seems to be everywhere these days, and I’m really into learning languages, so it should come as no surprise that I’m learning a lot of Python. This post serves as a review of Pandas Workout as well as a ‘first impression’ review of the Pandas a...

Continuing my theme of learning all the languages, I took the opportunity of a programming puzzle to try out the same approach in a handful of different languages to compare how they work. For an upcoming APL’ers meetup the challenge was set as posed a...

In this post I describe a useful programming pattern that I implemented, and hopefully provide a gentle introduction to the idea of monads. The motivation for all of this was that I had a {dplyr} pipeline as part of a {shiny} app that queries a database and I wanted to “...

As October rolls around once more, the term Hacktoberfest might pop across your feeds; an effort aiming to encourage people to contribute to open-source software, particularly if they’re new to that. In this post I’ll describe what I’m offering towards...

Gleam vs R I thoroughly dislike ‘hot takes’ comparing programming languages based solely on a “feel” or differential familiarity (“I know this one better therefore it is better) so when I came across a blog post detailing a small learning project wr...

A while ago (2019 seems so long ago now) I started working on something I thought was interesting but which never really got any traction. It has potential once more, so it’s about time I wrote up what it does and why I think it’s a useful idea. I’...

I’ve been using a lot of programming languages recently and they all have their quirks, differentiating features, and unique qualities, but one thing most of them have is that they handle strings as a collection of characters. R doesn’t, it has a “character” type which is 0 or more ...

A while ago I made some plots I really liked, but I never made a blog post about them. Then the data source stopped working and I couldn’t make them again. Now there’s a new data source, so it’s time for a post about some weather data! ...

I heard that learning Elm is a good way to approach learning Haskell, so I gave it a go and was surprised early on about an approach to writing abstracted HTML. In this post I compare the way that R and Elm generate HTML and the differences between the...

With a serious yak shaving deviation, I have a really short “cheat” solution to one of the featured Exercism problems. It’s been a really insightful journey getting to this point, and as always I’ve learned a lot along the way. The fact that I was able to understand ...

I’m solving Advent of Code this year using a relaxed criteria compared to last year in that I’m allowing myself to use packages where they’re helpful, rather than strictly base R. Last year I re-solved half of the exercises using Rust which helped me l...

In the lead up to Christmas each year, Advent of Code offers a series of 25 puzzles which start out reasonably simple, but get progressively harder, eventually requiring knowledge of algorithms and dynamic programming techniques. Last year I solved the...

If you’re reading this hoping that I’m done with droning on about array-languages, close the tab… it only gets worse from here. If you thought APL was unreadable, even after my earlier blog posts, again - close button is right there. In this post I try out a ...