Why this blog?

This Blog will include musings about my personal interests: geosciences, datascience, coding, photography, and more.

Getting better over time

Just start with something

Doing things that interest me

• I’ve slowly realized that I need to practice to write clearly.
• Currently, writing is the creative activity I enjoy most. I’ve realized I can do it seriously, persistently, almost daily. Once started, I can enjoy moments of fun and total immersion. Writing changes the way I read any text.
• On my hard drive, many older documents and side projects are waiting for fine-tuning, completion and ultimately release. As long as they are not on the net, they are “dead”.

Purely for personal use

I’ve contributed stuff to a few forums and online exchanges, but in the long-term this is too widely dispersed to have any impact. Sometimes a series of postings really belongs together (to be useful to me), but is incoherently distributed over several sites. Often I cannot recover it myself, when I need it again. So I had to look something up that I once knew in greater detail, and wrote about. For example, my ~5 documents on RPubs.com (the default site where you can publish/upload to, from within the RStudio IDE), for instance, are also not really under version control. In fact they are not under anyone’s control.

Here in this blog I can refine and rewrite my texts in-place, as often as I want.

Continuous technical education

There is still so much to learn about building and maintaining a web site. These days a modern web site is quite different from the database backed CMS web sites I used to build at my workplace.

More than ever before, modern web sites rely much more on third party compontents, for example: Hosting provided by Github or Netlify, commenting-system by Disqus, tracker by Google, and the list could go on and on. What I don’t use (yet): Photo galleries, user authentication systems, payment systems, maps, third-party realtime data-APIs, e.g. for ads or affiliation networks, near-realtime data such as current weather data, embeddings from other social networks…. These are much easier to integrate into a static site generator.

Also, just by blogging I get to learn new programming languages. The basics of Go. Modern Javascript, its tools and libraries. The browser includes many new powerful techologies: the HTML5 grabbag of technologies, Development tools…. I enjoy learning about the R ecosystem, for calculating things, but also for publishing (Math support, different output formats); R bindings to other programming languages. Some domain-specific languages….

Wide range of content categories

I’ve started the blog with a few posts about soccer data, for several reasons. One of them is that this sport fascinates a lot of people. Everyone understands something about soccer. Maybe this content will attract some readers. However I want to write about any other subjects: health and medicine, books, travel, biology, maybe even personal finance. I have a wide range of interests.

Further plans:

• Learn how to writing up something quickly, performing an analysis quickly is more important than calculating something sophisticated.
  
• Towards my long term goal of establishing a reproducible-research workflow for myself, having a personal blog is a nice warm-up exercise, or routine.
• Write more concisely

The logo is from a medical paper/blogpost I don’t remember the authors of. Original colorization subtly modified by me. Indicates brain activity of a patient reading out loud, so the left half of the brain is more active.