Model Blog: David Robinson of Variance Explained

http://varianceexplained.org/

Now this bit of spotlight is long overdue - Variance Explained was my first “model blog” in spirit, if not in post chronology.

David Robinson is so good at blogging. I was recently reminded of this while reading his latest post, “What’s the difference between data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence?” ¹.

His writing is engaging and plain-speaking, and he has a friendly style.

I greatly admire the look and feel of his blog - so much so that I’ve tried replicating his ‎clean way of referencing, linking, and footnoting within posts. His use of these keeps posts streamlined and highly readable.

I even chose to use Jekyll as the static site generator for this blog after noticing it in his footer.

I analyzed and reproduced (swapping Python for R) one of his posts as one of my very first in-depth undertakings for this blog. It introduced me to the concept of tidy data and much more. Other posts I’d recommend:

1. “Text analysis of Trump’s tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half” (and its follow-up a year later)
2. “Don’t teach built-in plotting to beginners (teach ggplot2)” ²
3. “Two years as a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow”
4. “Advice to aspiring data scientists: start a blog” (sound familiar?)
5. “Teach the tidyverse to beginners”

I only discovered Variance Explained this past May, but the rest of his backlog looks just as impressive³.

I am a huge fan and grateful to have David’s continued example.

Footnotes