My 2018 annual review

Posted on 4 mins read

#rstats goals

I love reading the many #rstats goals that people have posted on twitter. As 2019 commenced, in no time, Jason Baik presented the analysis of these tweet

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and Maëlle Salmon wrote a blogpost on it. Here is a bar/lollipop graph that Maëlle produced on the most mentioned topics:

I don’t think all mention of package here would refer to learning how to build an R package but Steph de Silva has come up with a lovely initiative with a lot of people happy to help you develop your R package so it’s a good year perhaps to get started if you have not build an R package before!

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One of the other top mentions was blog so it seems that either people want commit more to blogging, or if not that reading blogs :P

For my own goals, I certainly hope to blog more and help alleviate my anxiety in writing. Yes I do have those anxiety and it multiplies when I put my writing out in public. I get in particular self-conscious and perfectionist tendancies befall me. I don’t really take these emotions all negatively though as it pushes me to do better when I constantly question how I can improve my writing. At the same time I try not to get consumed in being perfect and debilitate me from writing. So here’s my start to the year to what I hope will be more writing!

2018 in review

2018 has been a busy but overall an amazing year for me. I don’t intend to write down everything at this moment as I have other things that I need to get done first but I also don’t want to delay for too long to write when the new year just started!

If I were to mention one thing that was amazing, it was getting more acquainted with the R community. I got to know a lot of wonderful people around the world who generously share their knowledge and tips via twitter. I know some of these people in real life; some I met for the first time this year and some I have yet to meet. It’s exciting to know that when I travel, I’ll have a chance to meet these people.

While overall 2018 has been a great year, it doesn’t mean everything that happened in 2018 has been good to me. One particular incident towards the end of the year stuck out as a sore thumb to me. I was upset. What followed was amazing though.

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  • A special topics session organised by Tamanna got accepted for ISI World Statistics Congress. This means that I will be speaking on the same stage with IBS President Louise Ryan and ISI President-elect John Bailer at ISI WSC 2019 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

  • In the week after that I got two invitations to present in 2019. I accepted both but I’m omitting any detail before any public announcement by the organisers.

  • The week after that I got notice on my success for grant funding where I was the lead. There was also another grant but I was not the lead for that one. Again I’m omitting detail here until it’s publicly announced.

  • I got asked to be in two projects. I commited 0.2 FTE on one and 0.15 FTE on the other. If it is funded then it means that I’ll have postdoc(s) or PhD student(s) to work with.

This all happened in a short span of time after I was quite upset. The way I feel is that the community somehow knew I was upset and all tried to make feel better. I know; what a hopeless romantic I am 😅 Nonetheless, I feel lucky to be part of the R community and hope that I can contribute more in 2019.

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