New, skills, new site, same Juan

Bye Hugo Academic, Hola distill!

*The views in my personal website do not reflect those of my employer nor affiliations.

Juan C. Sanchez-Arias https://www.juansanar.com/
11-06-2021

I have been rocking my personal website through a GitHub + Netlify concoction since its inception in Fall 2018 as I prepared for SfN 2018 in San Diego. During that fall I kept finding “twittertorials” on building a website with the above tools and how important an online presence was for academics, especially for us Early Career Researchers.

Screenshot from old website built with hugo-academic + GitHub + Netlify

In that moment, I decided not to use RStudio and blogdown as part of the process and made all my editing on VS Code as I was at the peak of my honeymoon with the mark-up language Markdown (a honeymoon that continues until today, I love markdown!) and was just getting a grasp of R and RStudio.

Managing a static website through hugo-academic was super fun and I really enjoyed the experience. I gained numerous skills that I always wanted to build up on as someone who has always loved tech, the internet, and more recently, programming.

I’ll miss the site and its features, but I am looking forward to explore and exploit the distill package for R. I find myself using R and RStudo more frequently for my day-to-day activities but also my hobbies and professional development, so this seemed like the most natural step moving forward.

I’m also hopeful that by having my website workflow well integrated with R and RStudio I can continue to advance my data science journey, because let’s face it, we all are data nerd deep inside and love nice plots

# Circle plot (example based on https://www.r-graph-gallery.com/226-plot-types-for-circular-plot.html)
circlize::circos.par("track.height" = 0.4)

data = data.frame(
  factor = sample(seq(1,24), 1000, replace = TRUE),
  x = rnorm(1000),
  y = runif(1000)
)

# Step1: Initialise the chart giving factor and x-axis.
circlize::circos.initialize( factors=data$factor, x=data$x )

circlize::circos.trackHist(data$factor, data$x, bg.col = "white", col = "#69b3a2")