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I know this seems like a tiny problem compared to everything else that has happened in 2020. But I started the year having learnt how to use Travis CI. This meant I could put my hobby projects under some kind of continuous testing. Now, whatever the merits of various workflows that can used for CI, Travis was supported by the R community. It was well integrated into R package development. Unfortunately, after an acquisition and a restructure, …

Recently, I’ve been updating my C++ skills. In the far past, I’ve used it to speed up algorithms in scripted languages. However, I have never used it as a standalone programming language. And when I say C++ I think I really mean C, I just happen to compile it with g++. Currently, I have a couple of problems which might change my limited exposure and get me much deeper in C++ …

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Having worked in various Agile and Waterfall environments I have become fascinated by the potential mismatch between Data Modelling and Agile. Searching for some discussion pieces on this, I found an interesting post that reviews a conference discussion. Ultimately, this dates from Enterprise Data World 2015, but does seem to draw on a lot of expertise from enterprise level people who have had to reconcile Data Modelling and Agile. …

One thing I have learnt is configuration management. It’s an under-rated aspect of reproducible research. I was quickly experimenting with an R package, but needed to install the sf package on my tinkering machine. That in turn required another R package units. And in turn, units needed some header files, as did sf. As it turns out, units package failed with a very nice error message telling me exactly what I had to do. And I had very had deja vu dealing with …

The current iteration of this website is a static website based on Hugo. In my opinion, there is a lot to like about static websites. I have previously used Jekyll and once upon a time coded html manually. However, modern static website generators allow a wonderful presentation. The currently styling is based upon the Terrassa theme; for me it scored highly for accessibility and mobile friendliness. The bigger issue for me though is to do data and version controlling. With …