A short story

This is now real, I have officially make this blog no more “work in progress”.

I initially created this blog in 2017 to follow a trend on the R community to have a blog. At the time, I was trying to contribute to Open Source on my free time and thought it could be good thing to have my own website. rbind.io organization was also a good opportunity to have a website with a cool url quickly setup: https://cderv.rbind.io was created

Truth is…

This project was at the time a great opportunity to learn blogdown, learn Hugo and how to tweak themes and websites. It was beneficial to me for that matters.

But second truth is…

Blogging (writing) is not my thing! This is not an activity I was used too, and I dedicated my open source time to contribute in code source and issues, what I thought would directly help others. I always thought that I had nothing interesting enough to share. That is why since then, only 2 blog posts were published on the only two topics I convinced myself it was interesting to make public1.

So what has changed ?

Since then, things happened…

I got more present in the R community, my contribution were welcomed and valued. I went to conferences, met some great people and learned a ton of stuff. I also evolved in my job and got more technical and more aligned with my interest in software development ecosystem2. Part of my commitment3 on Open Source work was to help others and I answered a lot of issues and a lot of questions (A very good way to learn something by the way!). So I happen to know stuff, and people were more and more asking me questions. So among all the discussion I had, the topic of blogging was always coming up. My excuse of not having anything to talk about was not real:

“You could just blog about all the answer you give online”
— @almosteveryone

Yes probably I could have done that. But at then that was not enough to get back to this website unfortunately.

So what has changed now ?

First, I was invited some times ago by Yihui Xie to coauthor a book on R Markdown. It seems he thought I was the right person to share some knowledge in his new book. It ended being the “The R Markdown Cookbook” published4 in 2020. So first change: I started writing !

Then, since August 2020, I am now a Software Engineer at RStudio. I have the chance to dedicate my time directly on Open Source. I was selected among other candidates to join the R Markdown team with Yihui. What an opportunity ! And what a slap on the head

You can’t say anymore that you have nothing to share. You know enough to be a software engineer in one of RStudio’s team! You surely have some things to share !
– Voice in my head

So that was it5 !

Let’s make this blog finally live!

I am now in a great team and doing great things in the open. I should at least share my notes in the open and tell what I am doing and what I know.

So from now on, you could expect to see this blog having some new content. It will probably be:

  • mainly short post. I like Yihui’s blog and Miles McBrain’s microblog for that.
  • sharing answer and how-to I usually only leave on their Github Issues, or in Gists.
  • new stuff I may work on, because after I work on R Markdown and this is surely something that is not of interest to me only.
  • short stories maybe, because it seems writing is a good habit to be at peace. So why not.

But hey, it could also be different! Only the future will let us know…

So Let’s start blogging on this new (old) blog! You are welcome to follow along with me!

  1. The 2019 RStudio Conf talk by David Robinson “The Ureasonable Effectiveness of Public Work” helped me on this consideration. ↩︎

  2. More on my background in the about page ↩︎

  3. which was only a commitment to myself toward the R community I wanted to give back to. ↩︎

  4. published by Chapman & Hall/CRC and and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. ↩︎

  5. I think I am also now at peace with myself that only interested people will read this blog and other won’t bother. Even it is for my future self, it is worth sharing in this site. right ? ↩︎