Welcome to ewenme (you-n-me)

A little bit on me

I’m Ewen, an analyst and data science hopeful with a social sciences background, currently working in UK government.

Why start a site?

I’ve been using R for data science-type workflows pretty intensively for about a year-and-a-half, and I had the realisation a few months back that I felt ready to add something to this conversation. I was also listening a lot to a journalism podcast, Longform, and they made writing sound quite noble/fun. Unfortunately for me, this realisation came before I discovered blogdown, so at first I put together a site using Github Pages and Jekyll (boo - the source files will remain over at this Github repo).

After coming across Yihui’s tour-de-force blogdown package soon after (I think it was in this rstudio::conf talk), I knew that jumping across to this set-up sooner rather than later would save me time and make my new blogging life a good deal nicer. So, I wasted no time…

Going live

My website ewenme (pronounced you-n-me) is now live and part of the Rbind family (source files over here. It’s hosted over at Netlify, which (I’m sure everyone has said already) was easy to get going with (and integrate with Git).

The theme

It was built using the hugo-creative-portfolio-theme by Kishan B, powered by Blogdown, and has a few things over there just now. The theme itself is probably intended for use by designer types, but I quite liked the idea of subverting this portfolio style for the purposes of an analytics blog. This is also a good moment to thank Amber (thanks, Amber!) for this slick guide that helped keep me mostly calm throughout this process.

What now?

I intend to keep the ‘brief’ pretty simple (for now) - that is, write and think about (and advocate for) data science in an opinionated but humane, ethical way, and to document the diversions I take in this field. I hope you can pick up something worthwhile on the way (there should be memes and puns worth stealing, at the very least).