The Nightmare That Is a New Blog
Starting a blog should not be a difficult feat; and yet that is just what it has proven to be for me. There are far too many questions that I still don’t have the answer to:
- What should I blog about?
- Who should I intend for the blog to be read by?
- How should I produce and publish it?
- When should I post my first piece of work?
On top of this I found myself on a never-ceasing chase for the perfect first post. Every time I felt like I was getting close to completion on a project I became faced with one of many dilemmas:
- There’s some bug in my work that I don’t know how to fix
- I don’t know enough to properly solve the problem I’m working on
- The project seems too simple to share with the world
I have let these issues envelope me and this has resulted in an ‘R’ directory clogged with the corpses of uncompleted works. Almost all forgotten in the chase for a new exciting idea doomed for the same fate. This has gone on for some time. But now I have decided that it’s time to put my foot down and take the plinge. Release anything. More exciting, difficult, and long-form work can always follow but the first step needed to be taken else that point would remain unreachable. I finally have the answers to the four questions that have been haunting me for the past few months: whatever, whoever, however, now.
The rest will follow soon as I learn more about what I want to achieve and how I can go about doing so. But for now, I hope you enjoy a small interactive visualisation I put together.
One small step for man, one small step for mankind
I have always been interested in the patterns and order you can derive from random noise. This is what this first project was about. I decided to generate a matrix of random integers in some range, colour them in, and then connect matching adjacent points with a line of the same colour. This gave rise to some interesting designs, two examples of which are shown below.
This was simple enough to do so I decided to make the visualisation interactive using the Shiny package. The result of this can be found here. Why not have a play with it and see what interesting designs it will generate for?
