Home

Why another blog about R?

Because…

This is not JUST about programming in R.

This site is about a few things:

Improving the author’s “R Kung-Fu”
The focus will be on “Deliberate Practice”
Hopefully this will provide something along the way to the readers out there (if any :)).

Assumptions are made when one learns how to program. After a while you use what you know, “how you know it”.

My goal behind the concept of “Kaizen” is mostly about improving through questioning stuff. Maybe sometimes obvious. Others, not so much. Anything goes: Programming style, Paradigms, secure coding, which IDE, which algorithm, which colours for the background of the screen, how to organise source files, when to create a script, when to use markdown instead, etc.

Really, anything. As long as it leads towards better, more useful code. In R, obviously – that’s just a choice I made some time ago, to focus on this one programming language (mostly as a hobby though). There will also be a particular focus on applications related to security data. This is just because it makes particular sense to me. But I do hope I’ll make it general enough for others to re-use ideas and concepts.

And it will only be about my opinion. There will always be better ways to it all, I know. I’m not saying whatever I write here is “best”, far from it: The more I learn, the more I gather how much of a beginner I really am. So feel free to disagree, that’s OK.

What to expect?

After a few years reading, studying & practising (not as much as I would like), I thought it was time to put order to some ideas learnt along the way. Hence this website.

COMMENTS AND BLOG ENTRIES

Do I use multiple files? How to name my variables? Do I use “<-” or “=”, and why? When to use a function? And an object? How to read data faster? Why one algorithm and not another? Is the assumption of “normality” mathematically correct in this or that case? Should I use a package for this? How to organise my code? What is “<<-” used for? (…)

From basics to excruciating details (hopefully) on very specific topics, we’ll see, this is still to be implemented. The idea is to ask questions and then work on an answer, all towards improvement, acknowledging upfront that perfection does not exist.

SAMPLE CODE

Mostly that part will be published on GitHub, though. We’ll point to it when appropriate.

NOT JUST FOR ME

There really would be no reason for me to start working on this blog if I didn’t hope to help somehow. I have read (many) books, I’ve studied on Coursera, I’ve even gone all the way to studying a two years part-time (one has to work) master focused on “Data Science”. But there are many bits and pieces to even the simple concept of “programming in R”, and I would like to improve on that.

StackOverflow obviously is invaluable. So is Google. But somehow I feel that, in the case of R, there is more to it. There are plenty of guidelines on the Internet. But there is also RStudio for an IDE. And so MANY packages to do all sorts of things… So much contribution by so many out there.