Hello World, I guess | Jorge Ruiz-Cabrejos

print(“Hello World”)

At the time of writing, my web(site) opens with an ominous message:

“This “personal” website has been changed and rebuilt several times over the past few years. Hopefully, this is the last one?”

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 access’. 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✨of a project 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.

Figure 1. Slide from a presentation for the course 'Data Challenge', as part of my MSc programme. Map on the right is my own. Diagram on the left probably not.

My documentation problem comes down to my “personal” projects (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.

Figure 2. Evolution of the different public health measures and policies taken during the COVID-19 pandemic in Perú, Mar-Jun 2020. Made by me using the package gantrify, from Giorgio Comai

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 automate the extraction of bidding data from a collection of unstructured texts, tables, and images inside 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.

Figure 3. Price evolution in GDKPs for two items in the game "World of Warcraft: Classic". Discord Servers were selected for the US realm of Pagle, PvE, Alliance side from the list available at the “GDKP/SR Weekly Calendar” from the PPNN and compiled by @Polyadic. Only items sold are considered. Original dataset contains 316 unique items and 10,747 data points.

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.

jruizcabrejos

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 and proper documentation.

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 kind of felt 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, maybe, it is more of an ’indexing’ problem and not so much a ’lack of documentation’ problem what I have.

Figure 4. "If you see me one day uploading to my tiktok a blog of my day-to-day and saying stuff no one asked with 2 likes, 10 views and 0 comments, leave me alone. I am exactly where I want to be" from @desorden-memetico on Instagram.

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:

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: