I’ve never been a big blogger, so setting up my own blog is a bit of an unfamiliar process. As you are reading these words, I must have had achieved this goal despite inexperience.
At the time of writing, you might have stumbled upon this bloggy looking page through my activity coding in the R language. I suppose that in the future, this blog will serve some less fleeting, medium-form communication need from me to the rest of the world. I now think it will be mostly about R programming, data visualisation and ggplot2. But I certainly don’t know what the future holds. These communications will neither be perfect nor complete, but that shouldn’t stymy me from stirring up these word salads, nor stymy you from lurking about on the internet.
Aside from a few guest posts in another place, this is my first solo post and as such, I suppose some introduction is in order. Hello, my name is Teun1 van den Brand, I live in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and have been coding in R since 2017. Previously, I’ve worked as a PhD student/researcher doing computational work in the analysis of chromatin biology in the lab of Elzo de Wit. Essentially I’ve looked at a lot of DNA sequencing data from assays on chromatin folding and organisation, which I analysed mostly in R.
During this time, I’ve whipped up my fair share of scientific data visualisations in regular reporting, presentations and publications. I liked this part a lot. You can clearly see how differently an audience responds to a thought-out figure versus a data-dump of a figure. It engages the audience more, regardless of the obscurity of your field, which will yield more sharp-witted questions and relevant feedback for you. Naturally, this had put me into the orbit of ggplot2 as the most widely recognised visualisation paradigm in the R programming language. What started as a personal cookbook for wrangling ggplot2 figures in the exact shape I needed, turned into a collection of hacks mud-wrestling about under ggplot2’s hood, which eventually grew out to the extension package ggh4x. It perfectly fits the cliché that somebody’s first package is a ‘miscellaneous’ package.
Somehow Thomas, who maintains ggplot2, must have noticed that my rummaging was sufficiently useful to offer me the opportunity to do this full time. So that is the way I’ve stumbled from ggplot2’s orbit to landing a paid gig to do what I already loved doing.