I built this blog using R and the packages rmarkdown and blogdown a little over two years ago. I haven’t been very good about updating it since. A big reason why is that it was really annoying using blogdown! I really liked the idea of keeping everything in R. I still think rmarkdown is fantastic and still plan to use it, but I ditched the blogdown package and am using the command line static site generator hugo that blogdown called for me directly instead.

I’ve been asked by a few different people now what language they should learn after R. Each time it has turned into a more complex conversation than what they were expecting. Hence, the rule of three and this blog post. I really love the R programming language. I haven’t always felt that way; in fact I really disliked R when I first tried to learn it. For example: Everything is a vector?

There’s often confusion amoung the data science and machine learning crowd about the quality of R as a production level language for deploying predictive models. Understandably, many programmers come from languages that don’t behave quite like R does and focus on libraries that R has few of. However, R helps us solve problems of data analysis much more easily that many other languages and some statistical methods have only been implemented in R.

My previous blog design, as last blog post, used Rmarkdown (.Rmd) to create and build out the site. Rmarkdown is a really powerful way to communicate using the tools that R provides, but it is really slow and painful to rebuild every post each time you make a change to the site. Also, while you can always add custom css styling to your site and your Rmarkdown files, I found that it was difficult to not spend countless hours doing so and still end up with something I really liked.

R Markdown This is an R Markdown document. Markdown is a simple formatting syntax for authoring HTML, PDF, and MS Word documents. For more details on using R Markdown see http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com. The R package rmarkdown can be used to create websites quickly and easily. If you are only interested in generating static content, which can include interactive charts using javascript, Github has free hosting through https://pages.github.com. Including Code and Graphs By using a format like R Markdown, you can write stories along with creating plots, for example: