Since starting my adventures in statistics and data science (over the last 5 years or so), I’ve spent nearly all of my working time fiddling with Apple’s macOS – well, OS X when I started – machines. After cycling through a couple Apple machines, I settled on a 2015 “new” (at the time) Macbook, working on which turned out to be a disaster. (I mean, battery life of ~3 hours, seriously? Read more

Recently, I came across the blogdown R package, a variant of RStudio’s popular bookdown R package, made by Yihui Xie and Amber Thomas. Blogdown allows the user to write blog posts with code chunks, in any of the large variety of languages supported by RMarkdown, allowing for computationally reproducible writing and programming. It also plays well with the new static site engine Hugo. Here, I’m mostly just going to take blogdown for a spin. Read more

Any computational scientist who spends their time writing and using tools or analyzing data has certainly had to spend a great deal of his/her time interacting with a command line interface (as an aside, I at one point spent so much time staring at the command line that I wrote a set of scripts to provide me with comical quotes to break up the monotony of my work – it can be found here). Read more

As part of the series of posts on computational tools that I have grown to love (“How to Love a Tool…”), here, I am going to talk about the Atom text editor, developed rather recently by GitHub. Unlike the other text editor I discussed in this series of blog posts - the awesome and minimal Neovim - Atom is designed to be “a hackable text editor for the 21st Century,” built mostly on web-based technologies (e. Read more

After adopting the minimalistic yet awesome Neovim as my new all-purpose text editor, I happened upon a new (and truly awesome!) shell, designed for heavy interaction with GitHub. After a few hours of playing around with this new tool, I am confident that using this new shell, playfully titled gitsome (think, “get some,” or maybe that’s just me reading in between the lines too much?), really does improve productivity tremendously. Of course nothing can take the place of Bash for general use (principally due to how ubiquitous Bash appears to be), but gitsome, and the underlying shell on which it is based (Xonsh), provides a look at what a modern shell environment ought to look like… Read more