Using Python to Cheat at Scrabble
My New Year’s Resolution was to learn Python. After taking a few online courses, I became comfortable enough with the language to tackle a small side project. Side projects are great for learning a...
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Choroplethr v3.6.4 is now on CRAN (and the Future of Choroplethr)
Choroplethr v3.6.4 is now on CRAN. This is the first update to the package in two years, and was necessary because of a recent change to the tigris package, which choroplethr uses to make Census Tract...
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Exploring the Demographics of US Congressional Districts in R
I recently created a few datasets to facilitate analyzing the interaction between demographics and political party affiliations of US Congressional Districts. My goal was to create this graph: I added...
View ArticleMy Courses are now Free
A few months ago I announced a change in direction: rather than continuing to focus on Choroplethr-related development and introductory R training, I was going to focus on the broader field of...
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choroplethr 3.7.1 is now on CRAN
When I took my first software engineering job at Electronic Arts 20 years ago someone told me “More time is spent maintaining old software than writing new software.” Since my project at the time...
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New package on CRAN: zctaCrosswalk
I am happy to announce that my new R package, zctaCrosswalk, is now on CRAN. This package contains the US Census Bureau’s 2020 ZCTA to County Relationship File, as well as convenience functions to...
View ArticleRequest for Resources: Teaching Computer Science Basics to R Programmers
One of the most enjoyable parts of my job is teaching R to our incoming analysts. These analysts are largely recent college graduates with a limited background in computer science and statistics....
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Why I’m Switching to Polars
I recently decided to switch from Pandas to Polars for my Python projects that use dataframes. I came to this decision while taking a workshop on Polars last week: I found its syntax to be so intuitive...
View ArticleChoroplethr is Scheduled to be Archived from CRAN
I was just notified by CRAN that choroplethr is scheduled to be archived on February 12. The reason is that choroplethr depends on the acs package, and the acs package is being archived. Apparently...
View ArticleIs CRAN Holding R Back?
Today the R package acs was “archived” from CRAN. This led to the choroplethr package (which I maintain) also being “archived”. I write “archived” in quotes because CRAN stands for “Comprehensive R...
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