Hello world

quarto
A new hope
Author

Daniel Tan

Published

July 15, 2022

Welcome to my blog

I started this blog to have a place on the internet where I can practice and publish my writing. Writing has been a very remarkable tool for both my professional and personal life. It helps me to organise my thoughts, maximise my impact and reflect on my learnings. Yet, I have consistently not prioritised writing and it is a disservice to myself that I have not made set aside time for deliberate practice.

I have started and abandoned more blogs than I can remember, so I always start a new blogging project with some apprehension. But, as mentioned above, writing is too important for me to not try again.

Here’s to another shot at this. Wish me luck!

My visualisation of Hello world + Quarto logo

Quarto

One reason why I got tempted to start a blog again is Quarto! Quarto is the shiny, new publishing framework (from RStudioPosit) that I use to publish this blog. Quarto is reminiscent of Rmarkdown, but rebuilt around the pandoc engine. Quarto feels purpose built for the entire data community, supporting all the major Data Science languages (Python, R, Julia, Javascript), and supporting a wide spectrum of output formats (pdf reports, websites, presentations and more).

You can see my unbridled enthusiasm after first learning about Quarto here.

…along with my “this-is-a-huge-moment-in-history” hyperbole

Jumpstarting this blog

These were the best resources I found online to help me jump start this blog.

1. Official Quarto Documentation (website and repos)

The official docs are extensive and well-written. Specific to building a blog, I frequently find myself on the website page, publishing page or thumbing through their gallery for inspiration.

2. Danielle Navarro’s “Porting a Distill Blog to Quarto” (blog and repo)

Danielle’s blog post is the perfect starting template. I found her recommended YAML settings, blog theme and deployment instructions very sensible and well-suited for a blog.

3. The small but growing collection of Quarto content online

At the time of writing, I did not find a large collection of Quarto-specific content online. Nevertheless, I did find some helpful gems from Youtube videos, Github discussions or websites that had a helpful tip or two that I could use for my blog.

Appendix

─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 setting  value
 version  R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16)
 os       macOS Ventura 13.5
 system   x86_64, darwin20
 ui       X11
 language (EN)
 collate  en_US.UTF-8
 ctype    en_US.UTF-8
 tz       Asia/Singapore
 date     2023-08-10
 pandoc   3.1.6 @ /usr/local/bin/ (via rmarkdown)
 quarto   1.3.433

─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 package     * version date (UTC) lib source
 sessioninfo * 1.2.2   2021-12-06 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.0)

 [1] /Users/ddanieltan/Code/ddanieltan.com/renv/library/R-4.3/x86_64-apple-darwin20
 [2] /Users/ddanieltan/Library/Caches/org.R-project.R/R/renv/sandbox/R-4.3/x86_64-apple-darwin20/84ba8b13

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment – Ernest Rutherford

Reuse

Citation

BibTeX citation:
@online{tan2022,
  author = {Tan, Daniel},
  title = {Hello World},
  date = {2022-07-15},
  url = {https://www.ddanieltan.com/posts/helloworld},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Tan, Daniel. 2022. “Hello World.” July 15, 2022. https://www.ddanieltan.com/posts/helloworld.