Hello World!
15 Jan 2016Just as the Hello World program is meant to introduce programmers to the basics of a new-to-the-noob programming language, this post is a break-the-ice post for me on my new blog. I’ve thought about doing a blog for a long time. But, there’s a lot of inertia to overcome when starting almost anything, and writing a blog is no different. I’m not usually described as lazy, but there was always a different MOOC to take, or LinkedIn post to read, or Denver Broncos game to watch, or one of my kids to chase. And sleep is important too – I am not one of those people who functions well when I’m low on sleep!
But, I keep feeling like I should make the effort, even if it’s only occasionally. Hadley Wickham, who has done so much to make R a bona-fide practical, useful, and (dare I say) beautiful language for Data Science, said something in his Reddit discussion that I haven’t forgotten:
If you want to give back, I think writing a blog is a great way. Many of the things that you struggle with will be common problems. Think about how to solve them well and describe your solution to others.
When it came time for me to start a blog at work, I found it was fairly simple to set up a Jekyll-powered blog on our Enterprise GitHub account (sorry, due to the proprietary nature of the work on that blog I will not be sharing it with the world). So I’ve taken some of that learning and set up this blog. But I owe many thanks to others who came before me and explained how they set up their Jekyll blogs, or created the templates:
- Joshua Lande: http://joshualande.com/jekyll-github-pages-poole/. A great resource for learning how to set up a blog like this.
- Ragu Papa: http://ragupappu.com/2015/04/22/setup-website-using-github-pages-and-jekyll/ . Has several links for improvements made to the theme.
- Mark Otto for developing the Poole/Lanyon theme: http://lanyon.getpoole.com/
Back to Hadley’s comment, this blog will by my attempt to “give back” when I have time and when inspiration strikes. I hope I can be even a little bit helpful to someone out there.
Thanks for reading!