Welcome

Welcome to my site.

I’m an NHS data analyst / BI developer based in Scotland.

This blog is mainly about R - an open source statistical programming language.

Why R?

Because I like it, there is a lot to learn, and there are plenty of SQL and Excel blogs out there already. Occasionally I write about other tools, and might pivot to new things in the future. But R is what I find myself wanting to use in my spare time.

R Skills demonstrated in this blog

tidyverse
data.table
data wrangling and manipulation
data visualisation
text mining and sentiment analysis
package development
programming
mapping / spatial data

rockthemes

An R colour palette package inspired by classic rock album covers. Continue reading rockthemes

runcharter

An R package for quality improvement analysis, now available on CRAN. Continue reading runcharter

See Projects for more

Why should I listen to you?

Because I’ll help you learn.
Mainly R, but also SQL, Excel, Statistical Process Control, BI…

I know what it is to struggle to understand something, and how good it feels when you finally get it, and can move on with your work.

I am always delighted to hear that my posts are helping others.

I am told that I’m good at simplifying and explaining things - I think that is a useful quality.

I am self taught - I don’t have a background in computing or statistics, so if I can do this, you can too.

simpler SQL with dplyr

comparing dplyr with SQL nested queries - and there is only one winner Continue reading simpler SQL with dplyr

The hourly heatmap with ggplot2

How I made the 24/7 heatmap from my previous post with ggplot2, dplyr and lubridate Continue reading The hourly heatmap with ggplot2

demystifying the coalesce function

coalesce is a one of those functions that might not strike you as being very useful, mainly because it doesn’t sound very exciting. But it IS useful, and might save you some time and complexity Continue reading demystifying the coalesce function

Well Well Well my Excel

I’m fed up forgetting how to combine lots of excel workbooks into one dataframe, so I’m documenting several ways of doing it, using purrr, data.table, rio and base R. Continue reading Well Well Well my Excel