Notes from a data witch

How to build a custom R graphics device

Did I need to write a graphics device to output plots to an HTML canvas? No I did not. Did anyone ask for this? Oh hells no. Ah, but did I have fun? Hahahahahahahaha. No

Danielle Navarro

Oct 18, 2026

Dining with wolves

LGBTQIA+

Polite discussion over lunch is not a reasonable option when you are on the menu

Danielle Navarro

Oct 5, 2026

Aperiodic tilings with the de Bruijn method

Art

A generative art tutorial on a geometric method I rather like, and some thoughts about artistic process

Danielle Navarro

Oct 1, 2026

The trouble with ‘ntile()’

Data Wrangling

Statistics

Please, please, please do not use ‘dplyr::ntile()’ in an analysis that will be submitted to a regulatory agency. It’s secretly an ill-conceived SQL tool that doesn’t do what…

Danielle Navarro

Sep 20, 2026

Release: sessioncheck 0.2

Reproducibility

Package Release

In which the author realises she doesn’t know how to write package release posts

Danielle Navarro

Sep 13, 2026

Separating sex and gender is statistical malpractice

Statistics

LGBTQIA+

The 2020 ABS standard for collecting sex and gender data is almost never the right approach outside the context it was designed for, and its spread into medicine and other…

Danielle Navarro

Aug 6, 2026

A cocaine skeptic starts an unwise habit

LLMs

You will be shocked to learn that this is not actually a post about cocaine

Danielle Navarro

Jul 26, 2026

Markdown styling in R plots and tables

Data Visualisation

Data Wrangling

There is very little novelty in this one, but it helps me to have it written down somewhere

Danielle Navarro

Jul 3, 2026

Some thoughts on checking the R session

Reproducibility

Package Release

More precisely, some thoughts on an R package I might send to CRAN, and I’d appreciate comments and criticism

Danielle Navarro

Jan 6, 2026

Mapping runkeeper data

Data Visualisation

Data Wrangling

Wherein the author attempts to convince herself that she hasn’t just been imagining things

Danielle Navarro

Jan 5, 2026

Two githubs, one laptop

Git

Some notes on managing multiple sets of github credentials on the one machine

Danielle Navarro

Dec 8, 2025

Some notes on survey weights

Statistics

Surveys

An area of statistics in which the author is not strong, and really needs to up her game

Danielle Navarro

Sep 27, 2025

Some notes on probability judgement

Statistics

Psychology

LGBTQIA+

For the love of fuck, literally nobody thinks that 20% of the population is transgender. Please stop sharing that ridiculous YouGov statistic

Danielle Navarro

Sep 21, 2025

Linear cosine palettes

Art

Kind of a generative art thing, but mostly an attempt by the author to prove to herself that a she can write a short blog post without turning it into a goddamn monograph

Danielle Navarro

Sep 14, 2025

GAMLSS, NHANES, and my own personal hell

Statistics

Fiiiiiiinally she writes the cursed GAMLSS post. Oh and it’s also about the NHANES data set I guess

Danielle Navarro

Sep 7, 2025

Splines, B-splines, P-splines, and a disapproving kitten

Statistics

No, I do not care about splines. But I am trying to learn about GAMLSS regression, and yes, it is to this dark place that this topic has taken me

Danielle Navarro

Sep 6, 2025

The Box-Cox power exponential distribution

Statistics

This is so obviously a prequel post to something else that I want to write about GAMLSS models

Danielle Navarro

Aug 2, 2025

Generating quarto syntax within R

Quarto

Literate Programming

Package Release

To quote Cassian Andor, “It’s harder than it looks”

Danielle Navarro

Jul 5, 2025

Bayesian Emax regression using brms

A little bit like the book chapters, except with fewer details about things you care about, and several weird digressions that nobody will love

Danielle Navarro

Jun 14, 2025

Scatterplot matrices with pairwise pivoting

Data Visualisation

Data Wrangling

As with so many things in life, something that I used to think was infuriatingly difficult and cumbersome turns out to be really easy if you just format the data properly

Danielle Navarro

Jun 3, 2025

When good pseudorandom numbers go bad

Reproducibility

Statistics

Multivariate normal sampling can be wildly irreproducible if you’re not careful. Sometimes more than others. There are eldritch horrors, ill-conditioned matrices, and…

Danielle Navarro

May 18, 2025

Making menacing hearts

Art

LGBTQIA+

In which the author calls the little mermaid a whore

Danielle Navarro

Apr 17, 2025

Three short stories about targets

In which our intrepid adventurer turns a hacky data visualisation exercise into an analysis pipeline; builds an R blog with litedown and targets; and tries to wrap her head…

Danielle Navarro

Jan 8, 2025

The schools of magic

Data Visualisation

Tidy Tuesday

Code and explanations for a Tidy Tuesday data visualisation exercise

Danielle Navarro

Jan 1, 2025

Art from code VII: Pixel filters

Art

An introduction to the ggfx package. Some weirdly distorted images are created. Good times are had by all concerned

Danielle Navarro

Dec 24, 2024

Art from code VI: Tiles and tessellations

Art

There are a lot of rectangles in this post. Also some foolishness with voronoi tessellations I guess

Danielle Navarro

Dec 23, 2024

Art from code V: Iterated function systems

Art

A deep dive into the fractal flame algorithm, an egregious coding error, and a lot more C++ than I would prefer to be writing

Danielle Navarro

Dec 22, 2024

Art from code IV: Shading tricks

Art

Let’s be honest, this entire post is a thinly-veiled excuse to play around and do terrible things with the rayshader package

Danielle Navarro

Dec 21, 2024

Art from code III: Polygon tricks

Art

It’s almost offensive how much you can do with 500 nearly-transparent polygons

Danielle Navarro

Dec 20, 2024

Art from code II. Spatial tricks with ambient

Art

Fun and games with spatial noise patterns, courtesy of the ambient package

Danielle Navarro

Dec 19, 2024

Art from code I: Generative art with R

Art

An act of wholesale, unapologetic theft. In which the author discusses the core logic of generative art, and (ab)uses the ggplot2 package for her own ungodly purposes

Danielle Navarro

Dec 18, 2024

Baby got backreferences

Regular Expressions

Now I have \2 problems

Danielle Navarro

Dec 16, 2024

Bézier curve

Art

Worms

What sins will she commit?

Danielle Navarro

Nov 24, 2024

Bayesian estimation for Emax regression

In which the author sighs a lot

Danielle Navarro

Nov 11, 2024

For fs

Command Line

Let’s be honest… I wrote this post because I wanted an excuse to be sweary. But I guess it’s also a post about interacting with the file system in R

Danielle Navarro

Oct 6, 2024

Use of flextable

Data Wrangling

In which the author explores the flextable R package for table construction, and gushes far too much about the work of Iain M. Banks

Danielle Navarro

Jul 4, 2024

Making tables in R with table1

Data Wrangling

A pretty reckless dive into a package that hits the sweet spot for me

Danielle Navarro

Jun 21, 2024

Plotting data in Julia

Julia

Data Visualisation

Part three of this three-part series of Julia posts, in which I try to figure out how to draw some nice plots

Danielle Navarro

Mar 3, 2024

Working with data in Julia

Julia

Data Wrangling

Part two of a three-part series on Julia, in which the author teaches herself the basics of wrangling rectangular data in Julia

Danielle Navarro

Mar 2, 2024

A foundation in Julia

Julia

Part one of a three-part series in which I swear I was going to keep it brief but ended up writing a staggeringly long set of notes on learning a bit of Julia

Danielle Navarro

Mar 1, 2024

Creating new generative art tools in R with grid, ambient, and S7

Object-Oriented Programming

Grid Graphics

Art

LGBTQIA+

There might be a darker undercurrent in this one

Danielle Navarro

Feb 25, 2024

Splatter

Art

How to make a mess with ggplot2 and ambient

Danielle Navarro

Jan 26, 2024

Notes on the Emax model

Pharmacometrics

A post that is little more than notes-to-self, on a model I want to make sure I understand

Danielle Navarro

Jan 9, 2024

Making generative art with observable.js

Javascript

Art

Observable

I’ve used observable.js before, but this time around I actually tried to understand how it works

Danielle Navarro

Jan 9, 2024

Writing knitr hooks

Literate Programming

Customising knitr output with hook functions is a handy skill, and I can never quite remember it when I need to, so here’s a blog post to remind myself

Danielle Navarro

Dec 30, 2023

Fine-grained control of RNG seeds in R

Randomness

In which the author was trying to fuck a spider but ended up shaving a yak with a fabulous Dua Lipa soundtrack in the background

Danielle Navarro

Dec 27, 2023

The blogdown of theseus

Javascript

Blogging

Literate Programming

Because you know what? I am here to fuck spiders

Danielle Navarro

Dec 23, 2023

Closed form solutions for a two-compartment pharmacokinetic model

Pharmacometrics

There are times when you simply have to derive a thing yourself in order to understand it, even if no-one else cares

Danielle Navarro

Dec 19, 2023

Another year ends

End of Year

Some say the year ends in fire, some say in ice. As to my own desire, any end at all will be nice.

Danielle Navarro

Dec 16, 2023

Pharmacometric simulation with rxode2

Pharmacometrics

Basically the same post as the last one. It’s a brief introduction to pharmacometric simulation, but this time I’m using rxode2 instead of mrgsolve

Danielle Navarro

Aug 28, 2023

Pharmacometric simulation with mrgsolve

Pharmacometrics

Yet another post in the ever-expanding series where Danielle teaches herself pharmacometric modelling, which I’m certain is thrilling to everyone

Danielle Navarro

Aug 14, 2023

Four ways to write assertion checks in R

It’s not 50 ways to leave your lover, but spend enough time talking about assertive programming in the bedroom and you’ll only have 49 more to discover

Danielle Navarro

Aug 8, 2023

Getting started with Torsten

Stan

Torsten

Pharmacometrics

Another small step along the path to Bayesian pharmacometrics

Danielle Navarro

Jul 15, 2023

Beware the IDEs of Windows (Subsystem for Linux)

Linux

Setting up nice developer environments on a Windows / Ubuntu-for-WSL system with the help of RStudio Server and the VS Code WSL extension

Danielle Navarro

Jul 2, 2023

Makefiles. Or, the balrog and the submersible

Reproducibility

Fly, you fools!

Danielle Navarro

Jun 30, 2023

Extracting tables from pdf files with tabulizer

Data Wrangling

Something nicer than the last post

Danielle Navarro

Jun 16, 2023

On living in dark times

Statistics

LGBTQIA+

Estimating the number internally displaced transgender people in the United States.

Danielle Navarro

Jun 15, 2023

A little ANSI trickery

LGBTQIA+

Fun and games with asciicast and cli. There’s really not much to this one except a little bit of personal entertainment

Danielle Navarro

Jun 14, 2023

Pins and needles

Reproducibility

Learning my lessons the hard way

Danielle Navarro

Jun 12, 2023

Building a population pharmacokinetic model with Stan

In which the author works her way through the first part of an online tutorial, rewrites some NONMEM code in Stan, and takes notes

Danielle Navarro

Jun 10, 2023

Software design by example

Software Design

Javascript

Regular Expressions

A book review, sort of. Not really. Look, Greg sent me a copy and I had fun reading it. okay?

Danielle Navarro

May 31, 2023

Santoku

Data Wrangling

On the small joys of clean, single-purpose R packages.

Danielle Navarro

May 22, 2023

Pharmacokinetic ODE models in Stan

A discussion of one- and two-compartment pharmacokinetic models with model implementations in Stan, covering both first-order dynamics and Michaelis-Menten kinetics.

Danielle Navarro

May 16, 2023

Non-compartmental analysis

Statistics

Pharmacometrics

A heavily oversimplified discussion of a simple pharmacokinetic tool, written as an exercise in teaching myself something new. Learning new things is always fun

Danielle Navarro

Apr 26, 2023

A personal essay on Bayes factors

Statistics

Bayes

In which the dead return to life and the author has opinions

Danielle Navarro

Apr 12, 2023

The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm

Statistics

MCMC

A note that I wrote for a computer science class I taught all the way back in 2010

Danielle Navarro

Apr 12, 2023

How to run R code in the browser with webR

WebR

In which the author gets unreasonably excited about a new thing

Danielle Navarro

Apr 9, 2023

Generative art with grid

Art

Grid Graphics

LGBTQIA+

I decided it was time to learn more about the grid package in R, and so naturally used it to make generative art

Danielle Navarro

Mar 31, 2023

Shattered landscapes

Art

Using ambient and rayshader to create weird, broken landcape images in R

Danielle Navarro

Mar 13, 2023

Fun and games with p5.js and observable.js in quarto

Okay it’s a short post in which I teach myself a bit of p5.js, but it does have five different donut examples which seems cool?

Danielle Navarro

Jan 14, 2023

Deploying R with kubernetes

Docker

Kubernetes

Plumber

In which it is painfully clear that the author is trying to figure it all out as she goes

Danielle Navarro

Jan 10, 2023

Playing with docker and the github container registry

Linux

Docker

In which the author learns how to use docker and, in her usual fashion, goes a little bit overboard. But there are also generative art whales, so that’s nice.

Danielle Navarro

Jan 1, 2023

btw I use Arch now

Linux

There is no reason for this.

Danielle Navarro

Dec 31, 2022

A very strange year

End of Year

A wrap up of my 2022. Even by the standards of the recent past this has been a very weird year for me. A lot has happened, both professionally and personally. I’m still…

Danielle Navarro

Dec 26, 2022

Queue

Parallel Computing

Object-Oriented Programming

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a post about multithreading must be in want of an async trick

Danielle Navarro

Dec 22, 2022

Crayola crayon colours

Data Wrangling

Data Visualisation

Am I bored in the house? Yes. And am I in the house bored? Also yes. But do I have rvest and a stubborn desire not to allow the horrors of ‘data encoded in the CSS style’ to…

Danielle Navarro

Dec 18, 2022

Unpacking Arrow Datasets

Apache Arrow

A comment on how Datasets work in Apache Arrow. I’m not really sure who the audience for this one. Am I just talking to myself? Probably.

Danielle Navarro

Nov 30, 2022

Everything I know about Mastodon

Mastodon

Social Media

A hastily written guide for data science folks trying to navigate the fediverse.

Danielle Navarro

Nov 3, 2022

Building an Arrow Flight server

Apache Arrow

Networking

Python

A step by step walkthrough introducing the reader to Arrow Flight, with examples in R and Python

Danielle Navarro

Oct 18, 2022

Data transfer between Python and R with rpy2 and Apache Arrow

Apache Arrow

Python

A Pythonic approach for sharing Arrow Tables between Python and R. This is the second in a two-part series on data transfer. In this post I discuss how the rpy2 Python…

Danielle Navarro

Sep 16, 2022

Passing Arrow data between R and Python with reticulate

Apache Arrow

Python

In a multi-language ‘polyglot’ data science world, it becomes important that we are able to pass large data sets efficiently from one language to another without making…

Danielle Navarro

Sep 9, 2022

Sudo ask me a password

Linux

Credentials

Resolving a little quirk in managing packages with pak on linux

Danielle Navarro

Sep 4, 2022

How to visualise a billion rows of data in R with Apache Arrow

Apache Arrow

Data Visualisation

In which the author grapples with the awkward question of what data visualisation really means when you have a staggering amount of data to work with

Danielle Navarro

Aug 23, 2022

Arrays and tables in Arrow

Apache Arrow

In which the author discusses arrays, chunked arrays, record batches, tables, and datasets in the R interface to Apache Arrow. Masochism is mentioned, and the music of…

Danielle Navarro

May 25, 2022

Porting a distill blog to quarto

I have moved this blog from distill over to quarto, and taken notes. A year after starting the blog, this promises to be an interesting reproducibility test

Danielle Navarro

Apr 20, 2022

Using Amazon S3 with R

Amazon S3

Somehow I was convinced that using Amazon S3 would be a supremely difficult thing to learn, kind of like learning git and GitHub for the first time. Thankfully, it’s…

Danielle Navarro

Mar 17, 2022

Data types in Arrow and R

Apache Arrow

A post describing fundamental data types in R and Apache Arrow, and how data is exchanged between the two systems. It covers conversion of logicals, integers, floats…

Danielle Navarro

Mar 4, 2022

R scripts for twitter mutes and blocks

Twitter

Social Media

Social media safety tools like muting and blocking are often misused, but for people who are targeted for harassment they are powerful and important. This is a brief…

Danielle Navarro

Feb 11, 2022

Binding Apache Arrow to R

Apache Arrow

I’ve been learning how to program with Apache Arrow inside R, and also I have been watching the SyFy show “The Magicians” obsessively. For no sensible reason I wrote a blog…

Danielle Navarro

Jan 18, 2022

Setting CRAN repository options

A quick post on how to use RStudio public package manager instead of a standard CRAN mirror, and an example of why that can be useful sometimes.

Danielle Navarro

Jan 10, 2022

Getting started with Apache Arrow

Apache Arrow

I’ve been wanting to learn the basics of Apache Arrow a while: this is the story of how an R user learned to stop worrying and love a standardised in-memory columnar data…

Danielle Navarro

Nov 19, 2021

Data serialisation in R

Serialisation

A terrifying descent into madness, or, an explanation of how R serialises an in-memory data structure to summon a sequence of bytes that can be saved or transmitted.…

Danielle Navarro

Nov 15, 2021

Unpredictable paintings

Art

An example showing how to build a generative art system in R. The post walks through some of the creative and design choices that are involved, and highlights how much of a…

Danielle Navarro

Nov 1, 2021

Generative art resources in R

Art

An extremely incomplete (and probably biased) list of resources to help an aspiring generative artist get started making pretty pictures in R

Danielle Navarro

Oct 19, 2021

How to mint digital art on HEN

Art

Not every artist wants to make cryptoart, and that’s okay. Others do, and that’s okay too. But if you want to try it out in a socially responsible way, it takes a bit of…

Danielle Navarro

Sep 26, 2021

Visualising the hits of Queen Britney

Tidy Tuesday

Data Visualisation

A gentle walkthrough of a few data wrangling and visualisation tools using the Billboard 100 data for this weeks Tidy Tuesday. Pitched at beginners looking to refresh their…

Danielle Navarro

Sep 14, 2021

Art, jasmines, and the water colours

Art

An essay and tutorial covering a few useful art techniques in R

Danielle Navarro

Sep 7, 2021

Managing GitHub credentials from R, difficulty level linux

Git

Credentials

Linux

A sick sad story in which a humble R user was forced to learn something about how linux stores passwords and, more importantly, got R to use her GitHub credentials properly

Danielle Navarro

Aug 8, 2021

Generative art in R

Art

Comments on an exhibit I contributed to as part of useR!2021

Danielle Navarro

Jul 8, 2021

Bootstrap cards in distill

Blogging

Bootstrap

Distill

How to enable bootstrap 4 on a distill website, even though you probably don’t need to. I like it though because I get to add pretty bootstrap cards

Danielle Navarro

Apr 19, 2021

Pretty little CLIs

Command Line

How to make a gorgeous command line interface in R using the cli package. Somewhere along the way I accidentally learned about ANSI control codes, which strikes me as…

Danielle Navarro

Apr 18, 2021

Welcome to the jungle

Blogging

Reproducibility

Distill

I have reluctantly decided to create a new blog. Some thoughts on what I hope to achieve, having tried my hand at blogging so very many times before

Danielle Navarro

Apr 5, 2021

Categories

How to build a custom R graphics device

Dining with wolves

Aperiodic tilings with the de Bruijn method

The trouble with ‘ntile()’

Release: sessioncheck 0.2

Separating sex and gender is statistical malpractice

A cocaine skeptic starts an unwise habit

Markdown styling in R plots and tables

Some thoughts on checking the R session

Mapping runkeeper data

Two githubs, one laptop

Some notes on survey weights

Some notes on probability judgement

Linear cosine palettes

GAMLSS, NHANES, and my own personal hell

Splines, B-splines, P-splines, and a disapproving kitten

The Box-Cox power exponential distribution

Generating quarto syntax within R

Bayesian Emax regression using brms

Scatterplot matrices with pairwise pivoting

When good pseudorandom numbers go bad

Making menacing hearts

Three short stories about targets

The schools of magic

Art from code VII: Pixel filters

Art from code VI: Tiles and tessellations

Art from code V: Iterated function systems

Art from code IV: Shading tricks

Art from code III: Polygon tricks

Art from code II. Spatial tricks with ambient

Art from code I: Generative art with R

Baby got backreferences

Bézier curve

Bayesian estimation for Emax regression

For fs

Use of flextable

Making tables in R with table1

Plotting data in Julia

Working with data in Julia

A foundation in Julia

Creating new generative art tools in R with grid, ambient, and S7

Splatter

Notes on the Emax model

Making generative art with observable.js

Writing knitr hooks

Fine-grained control of RNG seeds in R

The blogdown of theseus

Closed form solutions for a two-compartment pharmacokinetic model

Another year ends

Pharmacometric simulation with rxode2

Pharmacometric simulation with mrgsolve

Four ways to write assertion checks in R

Getting started with Torsten

Beware the IDEs of Windows (Subsystem for Linux)

Makefiles. Or, the balrog and the submersible

Extracting tables from pdf files with tabulizer

On living in dark times

A little ANSI trickery

Pins and needles

Building a population pharmacokinetic model with Stan

Software design by example

Santoku

Pharmacokinetic ODE models in Stan

Non-compartmental analysis

A personal essay on Bayes factors

The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm

How to run R code in the browser with webR

Generative art with grid

Shattered landscapes

Fun and games with p5.js and observable.js in quarto

Deploying R with kubernetes

Playing with docker and the github container registry

btw I use Arch now

A very strange year

Queue

Crayola crayon colours

Unpacking Arrow Datasets

Everything I know about Mastodon

Building an Arrow Flight server