Insights
A short shelf, kept deliberately short.
Technical writing we still stand behind. We would rather publish four things that are correct than thirty that fill a page — and where a piece has aged, it says so at the top rather than pretending otherwise.
01
Functional programming in R with purrr
The map family, safely/quietly/possibly, and why decomposing a pipeline into small pure functions makes it testable.
- R
- Functional programming
- tidyverse
April 2023
02
Probability and statistics: the concepts worth being precise about
The vocabulary that causes the most trouble when it is used loosely — with the visuals that make each one concrete.
- Statistics
- Probability
- Fundamentals
March 2023
03
tidyverse and data.table, and when we reach for each
Two idioms for the same job, compared honestly — including which one we actually use on gigabyte-to-terabyte data, and why.
- R
- Data wrangling
- Performance
February 2021
04
Conway's Game of Life, in R and in Python
Four rules, unbounded complexity, and the same simulation written twice so the two languages can be compared side by side.
- R
- Python
- Simulation
January 2018
On what is missing
Three further posts are held back rather than published, each for a specific reason: one has code samples broken by an encoding fault, and two call market data APIs that no longer exist, so their examples would not run for you. They will return when they work. An empty shelf is better than a shelf of things that break when a reader tries them.