Why start a blog?

Hello world! In this, my first post, let’s start with a variant on two of those old existential chestnuts, ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Why am I here?’ Or more precisely, what brings me to rstats and why am I wrestling with GitHub, blogdown and Hugo to create this blog at this particular time in my life?

I’m a social scientist with a keen interest in data analysis and visualization. I encountered R last year when a colleague blew me away by showing me how superior R Markdown was to my traditional methodology of copying and pasting Excel pivot tables and figures into multiple word documents to make multiple reports (e.g., one for each site).

Hotel quarantine in Sydney earlier this year gave me a chance to work through the introductory RStudio primers and the wonderful RYouWithMe course created by R-Ladies Sydney, and I’ve been developing my skills ever since.

I’m loving the learning I’m doing, and the resources that are available in the R Ladies and rstats communities, and this has pushed me into giving blogging a go as part of my learning process.

So, why start this blog? Here are five reasons I’ve taken the plunge:

1. To develop an online portfolio
2. To practice (and improve) my teaching
3. To improve the quality of my work
4. To make life easier for ‘future Lynley’
5. To cultivate (and maintain) a growth mindset

You can read more about each of these reasons below.

1. To develop an online portfolio

Developing an online portfolio was my primary motivation when the idea of creating this blog first entered my mind. I’m currently seeking employment, and increasingly I’m wanting to link to a portfolio of my work as part of my application. It’s all very well to talk in a job interview about your ability to communicate technical information competently to diverse audiences, or your skills in visualizing data, but I don’t think there’s anything better than being able to point potential employers to a portfolio of real-life examples showcasing your use of these skills in practice.

Here are some useful resources I’ve found with specific advice on building a data science portfolio (and good data to draw on):

• David Robinson’s Advice to aspiring data scientists: start a blog
• Michael Galarnyk’s How to build a data science portfolio
• Dataquest’s How to create a project portfolio for data science job applications
• Jasmine Vasandani’s Build your portfolio with these data for good project ideas

2. To practice (and improve) my teaching

As I looked further into the nitty gritty of how to go about setting up an online portfolio/blog, Rebecca Barter’s Becoming an R blogger significantly influenced my thinking. Rebecca talks about blogs as great ways to practice explaining things, and this resonated with me. I consider myself relatively quick (for a non-techy person) to use and embrace new technologies, and I really enjoy helping friends and colleagues find ways to make technology work for them. I’d like to do this more, and I believe that explaining things clearly is a learned skill that I can improve by doing.

On a related note, Emma Bostian, in a ladybug.dev podcast, describes blogging as ‘a form of asynchronous mentorship’. The idea that blogging about one’s own learning could be a way of paying it forward to help others in the future with their own learning strongly appealed to me.

3. To improve the quality of my work

On a related note, I think that blogging will help me improve the quality of my own work. First it will help consolidate my own learning. As they always say, if you want to know whether you’ve really understood something, try to teach it to someone else. Second, it will encourage me to create and share finished pieces of work, rather than flitting from one thing to another. Third, the prospect of sharing work publicly will hopefully raise the standard of my work.

4. To make life easier for ‘future Lynley’

And blogging... I really recommend blogging while you learn. It is a great way to save yourself some Google time. When you know you’ve written a blog post about something, you can just google yourself when you don’t remember exactly how to do it in #rstats 8/n

— A/Prof Jenny Richmond (@JenRichmondPhD) December 16, 2020

Jen Richmond has a series on her blog which she has titled IDHTG (I Don’t Have to Google), and has talked about being committed to blogging instructions to herself for anything she’s found herself googling at least three times. I think this is a fantastic idea. I’ve already tried reinventing the wheel with supposedly ‘simple’ tasks each time I’ve tried to update R, deal with projects hosted on Dropbox, or create initial summaries of variables in my dataset before conducting more detailed analyses. I can see myself creating and drawing on a lot of short blogposts on these and similar themes in my future.

Additionally, webpages are also great places to create and curate a collection of links to useful resources on various topics that you can come back to as you need them. I’m sure ‘future Lynley’ will be grateful when I get around to adding such a section to this blog.

5. To cultivate (and maintain) a growth mindset

Carol Dweck’s ‘growth mindset’ is a concept that’s often discussed in educational settings. Evidence suggests students who endorse a growth mindset (i.e., believing abilities are not fixed but can be developed through hard work, trying new strategies, and being willing to ask for input/help) tend to be more motivated and have higher levels of achievement.

I really liked Dweck’s suggestion that we acknowledge that all of us are mixtures of growth and fixed mindsets, and we can move closer to a growth mindset by watching for the fixed-mindset triggers that appear when we face challenges. Do we feel overly anxious sharing work in progress, fear criticism, or feel incompetent when our first attempts at a task fail? Does this provoke us to avoid persevering with different strategies, getting defensive, angry or defeated?

Learning new things is hard, and I’m going to misunderstand much about R while learning to use it. I’m going to miss things that are obvious to more experienced useRs, and write code that works in unconventional and overly convoluted ways. Sharing things when they are ‘good enough’ might be a useful way of developing my willingness to make mistakes in order to learn, and to grow through the generous feedback of a community of practice.

I love the idea of looking back over this blog a year from now, and seeing the mistakes I made when I began my journey. I hope it will bring back memories of not only the frustrations (and maybe embarrassment) I’ve experienced, but also the way my abilities have developed as I’ve taken risks.

Click the spoiler tag below to reveal additional commentary (and a shout-out to a great example of this I witnessed this year), if you’re okay with spoilers for the 2020 season of the Great British Bake Off.

GBBO Spoilers

I wanted to cheer when Dave Friday announced that his Showstopper in the Great British Bake Off final this year was themed the ‘Tower of Redemption’, taking this opportunity to bake again all the things that hadn’t gone so well the first time he tried them! Rather than giving up or becoming defensive, he took all the feedback he’d been given on board and showed how much improvement is possible!

In conclusion, these five reasons for blogging are what’s brought me to this place today. I’d encourage you to give it a go as well, if blogging is something you’re considering and these reasons resonate with you.