Hi there 👋

I'm Fran. Here's some headlines:

📦 development

• I 💙 making data tools as R packages
• My specialisms are working with APIs, and geospatial or demographic projects
• I am tidyverse-centric. I just think dplyr, ggplot2 and purrr in particular are fantastic toolkits
• I have an R-universe presence
• Other favourite packages include {sf} (and don't sleep on {sfext}), {cli} and {httr2}

Preferences

• I prefer user-powered and open products and platforms where possible - see the indieweb principles for example…
• … hence I try to avoid closed and enshittified platforms where I can. I'm also pretty averse to using LLMs - I don't think they are going to do us good as a society
• I'm moving a lot of my personal repositories to 🌄 Codeberg
• I try to prioritise ♻️ reproducibility in my work
• I favour a functional programming approach

Learning

• I'm really enjoying learning Julia
• I might get tempted to do some Rust development to support R, just for fun, like Josiah does
• I find Tidy Tuesday and Advent of Code really useful games for helping me learn stuff.

I'm currently working on...

• getting into the habit of documenting my learning and writing things up in a blog
• writing more effective unit tests and developing in a test-driven or behaviour-driven way
• developing my reflective practice as a data professional.

Other skills etc

• I have quite a bit of experience with HTML and S/CSS, though I'm pretty old school and not up to speed with modern web dev workflows. I have a soft spot for Eleventy
• I use Windows for work but I'd rather be using Arch Linux

Away from screens

I have been mostly

• 🌾🌾 mowing with my scythe
• 🎶📖 singing shapenote tunes
• 🏕️🚴🏻‍♂️ doing random adventures
• 🧑🏻‍🌾🥬 trying to get edible things to grow in my allotment, and
• 🏏🎾 playing some sports (honestly) very badly.

Contact

You're welcome to email me about any of my repos here. You can find me on 🦣 mastodon and 🦋 bluesky