A key part of the data analyst’s workflow is building dashboards and reports. In my experience, there are three distinct approaches to developing these products: Storyteller, Impresario, and Guide. The Storyteller Approach These dashboards and reports tell a compelling story… Read More »Storyteller, Impresario, or Guide: Varying approaches to dashboard development
Capturing this for my own future reference—and in case anyone else wants to create better histograms. The default ggplot histogram is functional but boring. Here’s a histogram showing the number of words in a set of movie reviews. Functional? yes.… Read More »better_hist: Extending ggplot2 with an opinionated histogram
I recently needed to download a YouTube video to embed in an educational PowerPoint, and ran into a lot of frustrations trying to figure out how to download. Browser extensions in 2025 seem to be iffy at best, with questionable… Read More »Pro-level YouTube Downloading
Bottom Line, Up Front What You Need The Ten Essentials are a formulation of the key things you need for survival in wilderness, originally formulated by The Mountaineers and later expanded on or adapted by many other groups. They provide… Read More »Survival Kit Recommendations
At least in the US, EMS serves in four primary capacities: There are other practice areas as well—industrial paramedics, travel/expedition medicine, and paramedic techs in hospitals or other medical facilities come to mind. But they are much less common and… Read More »Hot Take: EMT-B is not a career endpoint
This quote, from an otherwise forgettable book by a generally solid science fiction author, has resonated with me for years and encapsulates my personal philosophy on what general competence should look like. At times, I’ve even viewed this as a… Read More »On Being a Competent Generalist