why a blog?

Please Glitter Responsibly

In 2022 I attended the RStudio (now Posit) Conference in Washington, DC, and listened to a session containing 4 extremely interesting talks about design.

Unfortunately, they titled this group "Pour Some Glitter On It: Polishing the design of your shiny apps".

Why? You ask, did this distract me for nearly an entire calendar year? (sadly not an exaggeration).

1. Don't pour glitter! Glitter should be targeted for maximum effect.
2. Why glitter? It just gets everywhere. Demetri Martin's "glitter is the herpes of craft supplies" joke is spot on. I guess in some way maybe that is could be a good analogy, because you want your message to stay with your audience for a long long time... but still.
3. I firmly believe that good design is absolutely critical to producing deliverables that people want to use and actually do use. I know that this holds true for applications, powerpoint decks, and even basic Excel spreadsheets. I've spent the majority of my career orbiting around this concept.

So by the time the call came out to pitch talks for the 2023 conference, I had been stewing on this unfortunately named session title for at least 6 months. If only to save my sanity I had to pitch something.

20 Minutes is Not Long Enough

Now Posit itself is equal parts data science, data engineering, and development. But being a very open community, there are also dozens of user groups who attend these conferences - from pharma and life sciences researchers, to business operations, to the insurance industry. It's a uniquely and fantastically wide world of expertise at these things. So I did my best to identify a single train of thought that could be presented in the 20-minute window.

The Posit team liked it.

The Problem with Nerds

The problem with nerds is that when we hear something interesting that we can use to make our lives easier, we want more information about how we can use it.

I treat it as the utmost compliment that I had more than one person tell me they made some tweaks to their talks the day after mine using some of my tips. And I've had dozens of follow-up questions from people from chatting at the conference, or via email/LinkedIn.

So that brings us here: to a blog.

I plan on using this space as a place to expand on the topics of intersection of design, cognitive science in information processing, data storytelling, and information communication.

Hopefully, I'll be presenting again at Posit::conf(2024), however Posit is notoriously good at big swings at inclusivity and rarely accept talks from the same person two years in a row. So at a minimum, you'll see me as an attendee in Seattle in 2024. In the meantime, I'll be here.

  Foot Notes

The conferences are styled Posit::conf(2023) because its a jokey nod to the way we write code in the R language, and nerds are nothing if not excited to make corny jokes whenever possible. (Not just limited to R, go ask the python folks why the name of their language is python.)