David Ranzolin

The New York Times recently did an incredible feature on the first 12 hours of the devastating ‘Camp Fire.’ Less than 12 hours after the fire started, they reported, the fire had traveled 17 miles and burned 55000 acres. Can you picture 55000 acres? 17 miles is no problem, but... [Read More]

You can learn a lot about someone on Twitter. Not only through tweets, but also through whom one follows. [Read More]

In data visualization, less is often more, and the best advice is almost always “simplify simplify”. When viewing a chart, the viewer’s attention should be immediately drawn to something worth emphasizing: an outlier, a contrast, a pattern, etc. The less elements on the page the better. [Read More]

Assignment in R is a somewhat controversial thing, and there is only a loose consensus around best practices. The crux of the issue, I think, is readability vs. writability. Reading code can be a struggle; programmers want to reduce the amount of mental hurdles and friction on the way to... [Read More]

Have you ever started a project unsure how to accomplish several of the required tasks? Perhaps you were optimistic you would figure it out eventually, or (more likely) that you would find someone on the internet who had already figured it out for you. Such was my hope when I... [Read More]

I have yet to learn the tidy evaluation paradigm. Typically, violating DRY principles with a combination of hacks and brute force gets the job done. But a recent challenge at work took me perilously to the edge. [Read More]