Hello World, I guess
La fábula (El Greco): El Prado Museumprint(“Hello World”)
At the time of writing, my web(site) opens with an ominous message:
And while I do hope this is the last time I am rebuilding this website, I have to admit that I suffer from a ’lack of documentation’ problem. Don’t get me wrong, though:
Everything I have done in the context of “academic” projects has been meticulously documented and every step is detailed somewhere. Where possible, papers and methods are publicly available and open-source. If you don’t know what the FAIR Principles are, don’t talk to me, etc.
I also have the tendency to hoard and take note of every little idea, draft or file that was generated through the ✨process✨just in case we have to ’take a look back’ and reflect on it in the future.
I am also a big fan of using diagrams to describe stuff in general.
My documentation problem comes down to my “personal”(“pet”?) projects. Over the years I have written code in R for several tools to process, scrap, or extract data. I have generated data visualizations (most terrible, some great) that are located somewhere in the many virtual files I possess, but none of it has been publicly posted anywhere.
Some fragments of code lost to time are not impressive (or at least I would not call them as such), but I always think of them whenever I am asked for examples of previous work I have done.
Have I done some very complex Shiny apps? Yes. Do I have a Shiny app I can share with the class? No :(.
The ✨data collection process✨ to extract price data from a combination of unstructured texts, tables, and images in Discord chat servers for a World of Warcraft: Classic community took me about a dozen hours to refine.
All I have to show for it is a very simple graphic which I actually really like (the graphic does tell a story, for those who are a bit more familiar with its contents), but in retrospective it falls short when trying to convey the technical aspects behind the data collected.
Can I process unstructured chat data containing multiple types of data? Yeah. Can I explain to you how I did it?
Uh, kind of? Let me open the code I did 8 years ago.
This “personal” website is one of those “personal projects” that at some point existed, got abandoned, and had to be rebuilt over and over again, due to a lack of maintenance.
I took the jruizcabrejos ’nickname’ around 2015, and bought the .com domain at some point in 2018, shortly after having the talk with my supervisor about which ‘scholar/academic’ name should I choose for my (first) publication(s).
It is almost like choosing an appropriate username for a MMORPG videogame. Would you rather be known as the level 50 Warrior named Save? (one word, simple, elegant) Or as the level 50 Warrior known as XxAnimeManga01xX? (many words, unhinged, based).
In my case, “Jorge Ruiz” is fairly common and I would like to keep my mother surname, so I ended up using “Jorge Ruiz-Cabrejos” or jruizcabrejos / J. Ruiz-Cabrejos for most things.
Actually, it’s “Hello, World!”
These posts are a good excuse for me to document my personal projects and publish somewhere all the “waste code” that I generate along the way, starting with this website.
Finding the figures above (Fig.1, Fig.2 and Fig.3) took me longer than it took to write this post. So I guess it is more of an ’indexing’ problem and not so much a ’lack of documentation’ problem what I have.
References
Really helpful resources I used while building this website (and that I am 100% sure I will find myself looking back at them) are:
- https://connorrothschild.github.io/v4/post/animate-hugo-academic
- https://matteocourthoud.github.io/post/website/
- https://www.dsquintana.blog/create-an-academic-website-free-easy-2020/
- https://nickballou.com/blog/custom-wowchemy/#
- https://www.emilyzabor.com/tutorials/rmarkdown_websites_tutorial.html
Some personal websites I looked at for inspiration:
Footnote
The “[…],I guess” in the title is a reference to this amazing video from bill wurtz:
