I'm Fran. Here's some headlines:
- 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}
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
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.
You're welcome to email me about any of my repos here. You can find me on 🦣 mastodon and 🦋 bluesky





