Finally Real

For the last twenty years I’ve kept a list of books and projects that I didn’t think I would ever get around to doing. I am very (very) pleased that two of them have become a reality this summer thanks to the hard work of my RStudio interns:

• Yim Register is building lessons that teach statistics and data analysis to undergraduate software engineers using software engineering data and questions as examples. What she’s written so far is online (the domain name means “data science for software engineers”), and more case studies will be added in the weeks and months to come.

• Maya Gans has created TidyBlocks, a blocks-based tool for doing tidyverse-style data analysis. All of the usual suspects are supported, including select, filter, group-by, summarize, and various kinds of plots. More features and datasets are in the pipeline, and contributions would be welcome at https://github.com/tidyblocks/tidyblocks/. (Oh, and Maya’s looking for a job as a developer right now. She’s smart, learns quickly, is an excellent colleague, and does difficult things well—you’ll be glad you hired her.)

I’m really glad I had a chance to work with them both, and very grateful for what they’ve accomplished.