WARNING: This first post is a rambly one! But dive in all the same !

Well… I am finally here! This moment has been the culmination of much contemplation and procrastination!

Who am I? Why, drbulu ofcourse! For a basic idea of who I am and what I am about, please feel free to checkout my bio page.

Why am I here? Basically, I love learning, dig data analysis and take pleasure in programming. These interests, while enjoyable in themselves, are made even more satisfying in combination when applied to the pursuit of analysing and extracting insights from data, an excercise that I find myself engaging in with greater frequency.

This blog is my little aide, to help me capture and consolidate the things that I have learnt, and continue to learn, so that I can make the best use of the information that I possess. As I have journeyed through life, I have discovered a great personal need to systematically organise and store the things that I have learnt along the way. Though some things seemed trivial or pointless at the time, those concepts that I retained proved valuable in the future. Quite often, however, I have (and still sometimes) found myself rueing bits of information that I knew that I have learnt but was no longer able to recall, pondering the opportunity cost of not having the requisite information on hand (or in mind if you will).

Traditionally, I have previously not been of the folk to journal, “dear diary”, or whatever one deems to call that habit. Frankly, it seemed too much of a hassle. The constant need to write “stuff”, the archiving requirements of keeping the content, the fear of losing momentum and the concomittant hassle of trying to regain focus put me off. Later, even as I began to value the art of taking useful notes (usually distilled to mindmaps), the additional effort and, more irritatingly, the lack of connectivity was constantly distressing. By connectivity, I mean that in many cases, the information that we gather is in the form of an “information web” so to speak, where one piece of information may be usefully, and appropriately connected to more than one piece of information.

This situation, my persistent need for an efficient way to effectively gather and catalogue the useful, and often disparate, information gems that I encounter in my travels through this life was brought into sharp relieve when I began to learn programming, and subsequently start cultivating my data science capabilities. This was something that I had experienced (and still do) as a research scientist in my bid to keep up with, and attempt to assimilate, the rapidly growing body of literature relevant to my field. That said, this was different, I really enjoy working with data (of all kinds), and the tools and skills that I want to master, and the pace at which I desire to progress and grow, brought into sharp relief, the glaring inefficiencies that still plague my capacity to learn, and thus to grow.

Put simply, though you cannot remember what you haven’t learnt, you cannot properly learn the new, without the firm foundation of the old. No one can build a house of any value or strength when one constantly constructs the building foundation while simultaneously adding new storeys to the structure. In sharp retrospect… not sure how clear that last statement actually was.

Let’s try again… I desire a way to build upon what I know in order to be able to understand something new, while minimising the lookup cost of having to reaquire information that should be readily accessible. This requires organisation! One of my main “motivating” examples is the case of sorting data frame (spreadsheet table-like) objects in R. I would constantly forget how to perform this REALLY simple operation, costing me valuable time as I frequently Googled how to do this. While this example is fairly trivial, I hope that this gives you an idea of the cost of periodically “losing” valuable pieces of information. Admittedly, this is the type of scenario a good cheatsheet is meant to solve… yeah, stuff that in there with the dozens of mostly neglected browser bookmarks… winning strategy. Incidentally, for those without this problem, well done… as for me and my house the journey continues.

Rambling aside, this blog, and attendant website is an exciting step for me towards my continued self-development, and hopefully, others will find this site as useful to them as I have found other blogs and websites personally edifying… ONWARD!