It’s been a year or so since I stopped actively following the rstats community or R development in general. I checked in here and there but I didn’t need to use R on a daily basis so I let it slip. However recently I felt the need to pick it up again and what better way than to write a blogpost about it. How do you keep up with a programming language and its community?

This is going to be the shortest and fastest blogpost I’ve written so far. Or so I’m telling myself as I’m writing this, one can always hope. In the not so distant past I gave a lightning talk at the BirminghamR meetup. The talk was about the httr package and how you can use it to extract data from an API. This blogpost is the written form of that talk minus the jokes (they don’t work when written down).

Back in 2018 the city of Gloucester (UK) launched an initiative called Beat the Street to motivate people to get out and exercise. Beat Boxes (small rectangular boxes with an RFID chip) were installed at various locations around the city. People were then given a tag (also with an RFID chip) and encouraged to “tap” as many Beat Boxes as they could. Right after it launched I was excited to collect as many boxes as I could but I quickly realized that this would involve a lot of walking/biking.

In my previous post I explored the similarity of other names with my own name. However, as much as I’d like to believe, the world does not revolve around me. There are many different names in existence and people are being called many different things other than their given name all the time. This made me think: What if we applied the similarity graph to all names? We can calculate the similarity between all 97310 names in the babynames package and then create a humungous graph to visualise them.

Back in primary school we were once asked to pick a name for ourselves other than our given name. I picked the name Ronald because it was a common name in many different languages (notably English, German and Dutch). With it being common meant the name Ronald would rarely be misspelled or mispronounced. A problem I have since encountered a number of times with my own name. So much so that I started collecting data on it.

Amber Thomas wrote a really good blogpost on how to use blogdown, hugo and github to create your own blog. Like so many others I had been meaning to create a personal blog using GitHub Pages and her tutorial came at exactly the right time. I’m familiar with GitHub, git and R so that part was easy. Until I reached the part about creating a subrepository and havin all website files on the master branch.