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Oscar Baruffa

I'm a educator, blogger, and coach who loves to talk about business & entrepreneurship. Subscribe and join over 1,000+ newsletter readers every week!

Featured Post

📚10 New Books added to Big Book of R + R community on BlueSky🦋

Hi there Reader, There’s been a sudden jump in RStats peeps joining BlueSky, and some very familiar faces from the twitter days. You can find me here, and there’s a very handy “starter pack” which is a list of accounts to jumpstart your feed with! We’ve got a bumper edition in this latest update of Big Book of R. 10 new books in total. Many thanks to Peter Kemp, Isabella Velásquez, David Díaz Rodríguez and the ever-mysterious “Gary” for their contributions. Firstly, we have 4 new books added...

Hi there Reader, I’m super-excited to announce a bumper Big Book of R update. Quarto update Firstly, you’ll see that the site has been updated from bookdown to Quarto. Not only does it give us a nice visual update, the search function seems to work a lot better, and I think splitting the navigation into chapters on the left-hand side and content on the right makes this type of content easier to navigate. Because the site is programmatically generated, I knew that porting it over wouldn’t...

Hi there Reader, The Big Book of R has a collection of almost 400 free R books and as we round out 2023 it’s the perfect time to look back at which have been the most popular. I track the stats and they’re openly accessible. Some of these also have print versions. Get them either as a treat for yourself, a gift for a friend or colleague or even just to make the most out of your 2023 personal development budget! I’ve included an affiliate link to print versions where available. Not only will...

Hi there Reader, I highly recommend Kill it with Fire for data professionals building or inheriting a system. It’s just over 200 pages long and took me about 8 hours to read. Modernizing systems will become a key part of many data professionals’ work. When I was working in the construction industry, the elephant in the room of all the sustainable building design work I was doing on new buildings was that 99% of building stock had already been built, and refurbishing those to be more...

Hi there Reader, It's been a couple of months since I last emailed you about a data-related topic. As a reminder, you signed up to this newsletter either via one of my blog posts on data or via a Big Book of R update post. I had a great question from an analyst that spurred me to write this latest one (shared below in full). To get better at estimating lead times, you need to change how you provide your estimates. You need to identify the key risks and figure out how to test them early....

Hi there Reader, Earlier this year I applied for a grant to upgrade the Big Book of R. Unfortunately I was unsuccessful, but I am very proud of the proposal I put together. I'm sharing it in case you're curious or are looking for some inspiration for your own future proposals. https://oscarbaruffa.com/proposal/ Cheers, Oscar

Hi there Reader, Welcome to this roundup up the latest additions to the Big Book of R collection. We're now at about 370 R books, most of which are free! Thanks to Niels Ohlsen for for helping me add the books, and to Adejumo Ridwan Suleiman and Mokandil for their submissions. If you’d like to support the Big Book of R financially, you’re welcome to leave a donation at my Kofi account. Thank you very much to the two folks who already gave a token of thanks 🙂. Bookmark this post Yet Again: R +...

Hi there Reader, I've just switched newsletter platforms so fingers crossed I migrated everyone correctly 🤞😅. I wrote up a little post about opportunities to volunteer some data skills for worthy causes, whether you're a newbie or pro. > You can bookmark the blog post version of this email. There’s many ways to volunteer your time and skills helping causes you care about or to give back to the data community. I’ve listed just a few here and will add more as I find them. MapSwipe – the easiest...