Hello, Quarto !
Finally, I built my website using Quarto. Currently the page is hosted via GitHub Pages.
The Reason
Being an undergraduate student in a Statistics department, I started to get my first impulses through the school. In the first few years of school we dealt with a lot of theory regarding Statistics, Probability, Insurance and Actuarial Science. So I had got the first important foundations. Of course, I lacked the most important characteristic for a Statistician, to be able to give substance to the knowledge and to be able to apply the corresponding statistical techniques. The school paid very little attention to these with only two courses one in Excel and the other in SPSS. The SPSS course was good enough, but was in no way equivalent to the knowledge, nor did it meet the current needs of the job market. Apart from that SPSS as a software has several negative aspects that make it a pretty bad choice, among them that you cannot customize your model, you cannot see how the results are obtained and of course it is not free. In 2018 to 2019, I started looking for alternatives, as I completely loathed this particular program. Among others, I found similar software to SPSS, but free, such as PSPP, JASP and jamovi, where I personally found the last two quite remarkable, however they were not enough for me. Somewhere in there I discovered that there is a programming language that is focused on data analysis (Spoiler alert: It’s called R / Rstats).
Again and again
My relationship with R is starting 2019 with a lot of ups and downs. I can say that at first I found it quite strange and mostly used it quite procedurally. In short I was copying code and just trying to figure out what I was doing. That is, to expose myself even more, if I wanted to make a comparison if the differences were statistically significant I would Google it. Because of its specificity as a language I was using it more as an analysis tool than as a programming language. The first uses I had made of R were some simple statistical tests and I was excited that I could now use a tool with theoretically unlimited possibilities compared to “off-the-shelf” programs. Of course the whole journey was quite interesting with several all-nighters, but after countless error messages, I started to notice the gradual improvement.
It was a month ago, that I decided to start building my website. Initially, I was experimenting with other frameworks (e.g., Hugo with the help of blogdown, Distill), which were pretty good, but Quarto fulfilled my needs. The reasons for my decision are going to be discussed in a new article.
Objectives
As this is my first article on my website, I would like to enumerate my goals for this website. So, on this website, I am planning to :
- Write ML Notebooks (using R and Python)
- Upload articles that will help other users (e.g., “How to make your Quarto site” etc.)
- Showcasing my projects (regarding Shiny Apps, courses, etc.)
- Write posts about R in Greek as there are not many R users in Greece
- Solving exam papers on my website.
- And many more …, so stay tuned!
Acknowledgments
Image by R. E. Beck from Pixabay